Carnivore's Inquiry

Carnivore's Inquiry Synopsis

From a PEN/Faulkner Awardwinning author, The Caprices, seduces readers with a thriller praised as ';dazzling... lovely, literate and deeply unnerving' (The New York Times Book Review). When we meet Katherine, the winningand rather disturbingtwenty-three-year-old narrator, she has just left Italy and arrived in New York City, but what has propelled her there is a mystery.

She soon strikes up an affair with a middle-aged Russian emigre novelist she meets on the subway, and almost immediately moves into his apartment.

Katherine's occasional allusions to a frighteningly eccentric mother and tyrannical father suggest a somberness at the center of her otherwise flippant and sardonic demeanor. Soon restless, she begins journeying across the continent, trailed, everywhere she goes, by a string of murders. As the ritualistic killings begin to pile up, Katherine takes to meditating on cannibalism in literature, art, and history.

The story races toward a hair-raising conclusion, while Katherine and the reader close in on the reasons for both her and her mother's fascination with aberrant, violent behavior. A brilliantly subtle commentary on twenty-first-century consumerism and Western culture's obsession with new frontiers, A Carnivore's Inquiry is an unsettling exploration of the questionable appetites that lurk beneath the veneer of civilization.

';Murray paces her psychological thriller with consummate control, keeping the reader enthralled through subtle suggestion and a scattering of grisly details... Readers will be hooked by Murray's classy treatment of her sexy-sinister subject matter.' Publishers Weekly