The Fall Guy

Charlie, a wealthy banker with an uneasy conscience, invites his troubled cousin Matthew to visit him and his wife in their idyllic mountain-top house over the summer. As the days grow hotter, the friendship between the three begins to reveal its fault lines. When a fourth person arrives, the household finds itself suddenly in the grip of uncontrollable passions. Who is the real victim? Who is the perpetrator? And who, ultimately, is the fall guy?

About the Author :
James Lasdun’s books include The Fall Guy and Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked. He teaches creative writing at Columbia University and reviews regularly for the Guardian. His work has been filmed by Bernardo Bertolucci (Besieged) and he co-wrote the films Sunday, which won Best Feature and Best Screenplay awards at Sundance, and Signs and Wonders, starring Charlotte Rampling and Stellan Skarsgård.

Review :
Engaging, effortlessly readable… Lasdun’s writing style is clean and straightforward. All the complexity resides in character and detail. This is masterfully controlled 2am noir. What a sinister and searching novel this is – and what a delight. James Lasdun is one of our great writers. Exceptionally entertaining…The Fall Guy reads like early Ian McEwan or late Patricia Highsmith… Lasdun is masterly in his story’s construction… This is exactly what a literary thriller should be: intelligent, careful, swift, unsettling. Nothing is straightforward in this slick, Highsmithian thriller, and while the damaged Matthew’s capacity for self-deception is flagged early, Lasdun’s skill lies not least in letting us think that we might therefore have his number. Wrong – and yet the novel’s denouement feels fated even as it smoothly steals the breath. Impossible to put down. A deftly constructed narratives of guilt and buried resentment Already drawing comparisons to Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train — but more aptly described as the literary descendant of Dostoyevsky and Patricia Highsmith in an alluring contemporary setting — The Fall Guy is a twisty, chilly, exquisitely written, and tautly suspenseful exploration of big ideas in the guise of a psychological thriller. James Lasdun seems to be one of the secret gardens of English writing…when we read him we know what language is for … In sentence after sentence, the reader feels Lasdun’s words shaping and then freely donating a world to us, with great flexible artistry. The early pages crackle with a gut-level sense of menace… [There is] a brilliantly unbearable pivotal scene… The artistry in this morally complex, coolly seductive portrait of an imploding psyche means that there is plenty to admire on a repeat visit. James Lasdun has written an elegantly suspenseful novel set in a brilliantly realised affluent upstate New York community not unlike Woodstock – his characters are achingly real, and the self-deceptions that drive them so insightfully depicted, we might almost mistake them for our own. Truly a “page-turner” – propelled toward just the right ending.