LoveReading Says
LoveReading Says
Shortlisted for the Spread the Word : Books to Talk About 2008.
Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2007.
Costa Book Awards 2007 Judges' comment: "An exquisitely written ghost story - morally subtle, psychologically involving and exactly crafted."
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Death of a Murderer Synopsis
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.
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Press Reviews
Rupert Thomson Press 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
Author
About Rupert Thomson
Rupert Thomson is the author of thirteen critically acclaimed novels, including The Insult, which was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize, and chosen by David Bowie as one of his 100 Must-Read Books of All Time, Death of a Murderer, which was shortlisted for the Costa Prize, and The Book of Revelation, which was made into a feature film by the Australian writer/director, Ana Kokkinos. His memoir, This Party’s Got to Stop, won the Writers’ Guild Non-Fiction Book of the Year in 2010. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has contributed to the Financial Times, Guardian, London Review of Books, Granta, and Independent. He lives in London.
Photograph © Robin Farquhar
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