Synopsis
Death of a Murderer by Rupert Thomson
In November 2002, police constable Billy Tyler is summoned to the mortuary of a hospital in Suffolk. For the next twelve hours, from seven in the evening till seven in the morning, he is responsible for guarding the body of the notorious child-killer Myra Hindley. In the face of public hostility and media frenzy, Billy’s job, as his superior puts it, is to ‘make sure nothing happens'.
Billy’s approach is utterly professional, but as the night wears on, in the eerie silence of the hospital, the dead woman's presence begins to assert itself, and Billy’s own problems and anxieties - a stalled career, a fractious marriage, a disabled daughter — gradually acquire a new and unexpected significance.
Reviews
'Rupert Thomson reaches the summit of his powers with his new book Death of a Murderer, a novel of beautiful moral complexity. We thought we knew Myra Hindley, and were done with her, but Thomson brings a fresh awareness of life and death to the matter, and shows, in the goodness of the telling, a wealth of the novelist's art.' — Andrew O'Hagan
About the Author
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Born on the south coast of England in 1955, Rupert Thomson was educated at Christ’s Hospital School. At the age of seventeen he won a scholarship to Cambridge University where he studied Medieval History and Political Thought. In his twenties, he spent four years working as a copywriter in London, but in 1982 he moved to Italy where he started work on a novel. Dreams of Leaving was published in 1987, and was hailed in the Times as ‘extraordinarily elegant, evocative and funny’, while the New Statesman wrote: ‘When someone writes as well as Thomson does, it makes you wonder why other people bother.’ Since then, he has published six more highly acclaimed novels, two of which, Air and Fire and The Insult have been shortlisted for awards. Though his books consistently defy categorisation, the San Francisco Chronicle came closer than most when it described him as a ‘twisted British fabulist’. During the past twenty years he has lived in many cities, including London, Berlin, New York, Tokyo, Sydney, Los Angeles, Amsterdam and Rome. He currently lives in Barcelona.
Photograph © Hugo Glendinning
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Literary / Contemporary
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