The Fall Guy

by James Lasdun

Book Overview

It is summer, 2012. Charlie, a wealthy banker with an uneasy conscience, invites his troubled cousin Matthew to visit him and his wife in their idyllic mountaintop house. As the days grow hotter, the friendship between the three begins to reveal its fault lines, and with the arrival of a fourth character, the household finds itself suddenly in the grip of uncontrollable passions. As readers of James Lasdun's acclaimed fiction can expect, The Fall Guy is a complex moral tale as well as a gripping suspense story, probing questions of guilt and betrayal with ruthless incisiveness. Who is the real victim here? Who is the perpetrator? And who, ultimately, is the fall guy? Darkly vivid, with an atmosphere of erotic danger, The Fall Guy is Lasdun's most entertaining novel yet.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393292320
• ISBN13: 9780393292329
• Release Date: October 2016
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.7" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Unraveling the Spiderweb

I loved the unreliable characters and their individual webs of deceit. Read this in two days because I wanted to know how it ended.

Complex writing with poor execution of the plot and characters

The writing was complex and did a beautiful job trying to convey the story. The execution of the characters and the plot left a lot to be desired. You would think that in a psychological thriller there would be a lot more things happening, or something of significance. The main character, Matthew, just seemed really out of it. I think it would have been so much better for the story to be told by all 3 characters instead of just Matthew's POV. I felt his thinking wasn't even cohesive from the get go and was a major creep from the beginning. Charlie and Chloe were pretty under developed. It seemed the author spent a little more time developing the scenes than in the characters themselves. While I did enjoy the writing itself, it's not my cup of tea for a thriller novel.