The Fall Guy

Reviews / Votes

""[Lasdun has] the natural capacity to wield words with uncanny and disorienting power. . . .The Fall Guy has the quality of a dream that follows its own terrible logic, impossible to break free from, never to be forgotten after you wake up."" -- BookPage "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." -- New York Times Book Review ""With its deftly constructed narratives of guilt and buried resentment, The Fall Guy is more accessible than Lasdun's previous novels. . . . [W]atching Matthew, Charlie and Chloe lure one another into a trap not quite of their own making has a certain shivery fascination . . . you think of Highsmith or Hitchcock."" -- The Guardian "What a sinister and searching novel this is-and what a delight. James Lasdun is one of our great writers." -- Joseph O'Neill, author of Netherland "Elegant and disturbing... This simple-seeming novel, so graceful in its unfolding, proves dense with psychological detail and sly social observations." -- Wall Street Journal "James Lasdun has written an elegantly suspenseful novel set in a brilliantly realized 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." -- Joyce Carol Oates "Expertly playing the noir card, Lasdun dissects the mercurial relationships among a wealthy financier, his photographer wife and an aimless cousin during a long hot summer in upstate New York. There are plenty of lies and betrayals in this stylish thriller, but it's the slow burn of obsession that makes it sing." -- People "In The Fall Guy, James Lasdun brings the signature gifts to contemporary noir that he's displayed in other literary venues-wit, style, an attractive gravitas. And the tale itself is sharp, acute in its observations, and absorbing. It's a rich read." -- Norman Rush, author of Subtle Bodies "A twisty, chilly, exquisitely written, and tautly suspenseful exploration of big ideas in the guise of a psychological thriller. . .Lasdun's prose is both lapidary and hypnotic." -- Boston Globe "As the pages turn, the nervous tension ticks ever higher in Lasdun's combustible psychological thriller." -- Entertainment Weekly "Exquisitely written yet propulsively entertaining all at the same time. . . a journey into the psyche of a stalker by someone who has been stalked." -- Seattle Review of Books "[A] terrific novel of suspense. . . Lasdun presents the inexorable turnings of fate in a subtle and disconcerting way." -- Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) "Lasdun's controlled, devious storytelling style infuses every tick of the clock with tension." -- Kirkus Reviews