The Fall Guy

In this taut psychological thriller, a couple and their houseguest find themselves caught in a deadly web of secrets, obsession, and revenge. 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.

Handyman Cedric O'Toole is set up to take the fall for a murder he didn't commit. He'll need all his inventive powers to save himself.

It is the Swinging Sixties and Kelvin Walker has moved from Scotland to London to make his fortune. Through his wanton ambition, a megalomania surfaces that is unrelieved by his insensitive attempts at friendship and romance. Yet is he all bad, or are the true villains the establishment figures who he tricks and deceives? And, ultimately, does it matter? Gray’s twist on the follies of religion, the media and the imperial British centre is as relevant now as ever.

Originally published: London: Hodder Children's Books, 2007.

The Fall Guy, first published in 1945, is a fast-paced noir murder mystery featuring Chicago P.I. Rush Henry. Joe Barry was the pen name of Joe Barry Lake (1909-1961), author of ten detective novels and a number of television shows. From the dust jacket: The door had scarcely closed on the mysterious young man who had sought protection from Rush Henry because he feared for his life when wealthy Paul Germaine, Sr., brought one of the strangest requests of Rush’s hectic career as a private investigator. Rush was to keep Chicago mobsters away from Germaine’s brilliant young daughter, Leslie, whose interest in criminal psychology had made her determined to find out, first-hand, what made a gangster tick. Five minutest later Rush found the mysterious young man stabbed to death in the alley outside his office. The dead man was Germaine’s son, Paul Germaine, Jr. Then a tall, cadaverous man in ministerial black informed Rush that he had seen the murderer run from the alley and instantly Rush knew that a strange mob had moved in. The tall man was Otho Brin, first of several San Francisco gangsters Rush was so soon to encounter. Was Brin playing a lone hand, or was he connected with suave, cultured Bernard Jago and his lovely daughter, Myrna? Was the San Francisco gang bucking the Chicago mob? Which had been responsible for young Germaine’s murder? And what was daring young Leslie Germaine’s connection with her brother’s death? A swift, baffling Crime Fiction of underworlds at war—and of the fall guy caught between.

Handyman Cedric O'Toole likes his simple life. He lives by himself on a hardscrabble farm, collecting sheds full of junk and dreaming of his next invention. Then one day a slick city lawyer drives down his lane and his nightmare begins. Lori-Anne Wilkins, the wife of a wealthy local businessman, has fallen to her death from a deck Cedric built, and the furious widower has slapped him with a lawsuit. When Cedric goes to check out the accident site, he discovers that someone has tampered with the railing around the deck. It appears he's been set up to take the blame. But who might want Mrs. Wilkins dead? Then, when someone runs him off the road, he realizes that his life is in danger too. To clear his name and save his life, Cedric has to use his inventive mind to trap the real killer.

A witty, action-packed thriller starring a “tough, wisecracking British operative” (The New York Times Book Review). The British Intelligence outfit SR(2) has lost too many agents already trying to stop the European cocaine trade. Now they need someone unknown to succeed where they have failed—they need Philis. Whether he’s courting danger or women, this smuggler-turned-secret-agent is as villainous as he is seductive. Philis has no interest in helping the authorities—until a longtime friend is brutally tortured and an innocent woman beaten to within an inch of her life. Now Philis has but one aim: to find the ruthless drug leader behind it all, and make him pay for his crimes. But he has no idea what he’s about to get into, in this fast-paced espionage thriller featuring a hero who’s “as resilient as a rubber band” (Kirkus Reviews). “A master of the genre at the top of his game.” —Tom Kasey, bestselling author of Cold Kill