Death of a Murderer

Zusatztext "As beautifully written as it is provocative. . . . By the end of this subtly disturbing story! life itself seems a lot more precious." — The New York Times Book Review “Thomson powerfully evokes the psychic and emotional scars caused by horrible crimes [and] poses questions that seem to pervade our relativistic times: If evil exists! then what defines it? How do we recognize it in others and in ourselves? How do we find love in spite of it?” — The Washington Post “Quietly devastating.” — The Seattle Times "Extremely tightly written! with not a word extraneous! [and] with passages that will take your breath away! because they're so knowing! or because they're so lyrical. Tender is the night! but creepy! too." — The New York Observer Informationen zum Autor Rupert Thomson Klappentext After decades in prison for crimes gruesomely familiar to everyone in England, a murderer has finally died of natural causes, no less notorious in death than she was in life. Billy Tyler, a career policeman, has been assigned the task of guarding her body in the hospital morgue. But alone on a graveyard shift his wife begged him not accept, Billy has occasion to contemplate the various turns his life has taken and to discover why it is that on this dark night of the soul the reviled murderer seems to speak to him directly. Death of a Murderer is a gripping novel of crime, punishment, fear, and temptation. Leseprobe Chapter One When the news came through on the car radio, Billy sat quite motionless, unable to do anything but listen. He was parked on Norwich Road, outside a place called Glamour Gear. Lying on the seat beside him, sealed in an envelope of transparent plastic, were the ballet shoes he had promised to collect on his way home. The windscreen was starting to mist up, but he could still see out. An ordinary street in an ordinary English town. Friday afternoon. Lights on in all the shops, the pavement wet with rain . . .He didn’t have any particular thoughts about the woman’s death. He didn’t feel sorry, or relieved, or cheated. It was vaguer than that, and more powerful. The woman had been involved in the murder of at least five people, three of them young children, and she had been feared and hated ever since. Children had been savagely abused in front of her by her own boyfriend, and she had gone along with it; she had even, possibly, tortured one of them herself. The victims’ bodies had been buried on a high, desolate moor to the east of Manchester. It had all happened years ago, in the sixties, but people had never forgiven her for what she had done. Never forgiven, and never forgotten. And now she had died, of natural causes, in a hospital twenty miles away. It was one of those heightened moments when you make a mental note of your surroundings, and yet the whole thing felt oddly muted, scaled down, like watching an explosion through a telescope. Certainly, it never occurred to him that her death might affect him directly; he had no idea, at that point, that he was about to become part of the story.The phone rang three days later, on the Monday evening, while he was watching a TV programme about the mystery of the pyramids. He would be leaving for work before too long, so he let his wife, Sue, take the call.“Yes, he is,” he heard her say. “I’ll just get him.”Eyes bright, almost silvery, she held the phone out to him and mouthed the words It’s for you . These days there was an exaggerated quality about her that he found bewildering: she would get excited over nothing, and angry over nothing. They had been together for fourteen years, married for ten, and yet he seemed to see her less clearly now than he had at the beginning.Moving across the room, he took the phone from her and turned towards the window. Though it had already been dark for several hours, he parted the curtains and put his face close to the glass. He could just mak...

Product details

• Authors: Rupert Thomson
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 12.08.2008
• EAN: 9780307278746
• ISBN: 978-0-307-27874-6
• No. of pages: 240
• Dimensions: 133 mm x 202 mm x 15 mm
• Series: Vintage International; Vintage International
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature