Audacious Perversion

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

English journalist Sanderson infuses the slasher crime novel with British class warfare in this dry tragicomedy about a 28-year-old crossword-puzzle-obsessed London magazine writer whose misanthropy barely overtakes his self-hatred. Just as the backward spelling of Martin Redrum's last name tips off the reader, the acrostic of his disastrous dinner party's guest list--Michael, Alex, Rory, Trudi, Isobel, and Nicola--is enough to set him off on a methodical murder spree. These "friends," whom he considers undeservedly richer or more successful than himself, start meeting their demises in occasionally creative and appropriate ways, such as death by tanning bed, exercise weights and cocaine. Sanderson goes over the ground broken long ago by Martin Amis and Bret Easton Ellis (while fans of Stephen King's The Shining will recognize the Redrum ploy) as he reconstructs a now-tiresome landscape filled with yuppie hedonists, narcissists and wastrels, all warranting death in Martin's jaded opinion. Any satire or wit is subsumed in the planning of Martin's next killing, the arrangement of another alibi or the release of another red herring. Part of the publisher's Bloodlines crime series, this novel is ultimately undermined by a protagonist insufficiently sympathetic to win readers' hearts and inadequately villainous to gain their hisses. (Mar.)

Library Journal

If dirty looks or rapier wit could kill, most of us would be long dead, or at least severely wounded. After another dull dinner party with six of his successful media friends, Martin Rundrum decides on a whim to adopt more efficient weapons and do in his companions one by one. Included in his arsenal are superglue, a microwave oven, a sunbed, and, in a moment when creativity fails him, a shotgun. He approaches each murder with all the detached calculation he applies to filling in his beloved crossword puzzles. Any similarity between this darkly humorous novel and those of Brett Easton Ellis is probably intentional. Sanderson is a London journalist and obviously relishes the opportunity to skewer post-Thatcher London society as much as Ellis enjoys doing the same to Manhattan. Sanderson does, though, put his own spin on things. The murders are all carefully timed so as never to interfere with tea, and Martin is a bisexual always eager to bed whoever might be available. Suitable wherever Ellis's novels are popular.--Bob Lunn, Kansas City P.L.

Kirkus Reviews

Martin Rudrum likes cocaine, routine, and crossword puzzles. What he doesn't like is his friends-not even Isobel Walker, the ex-girlfriend who threw him over for tanned, toned TV producer Michael Ford-so after a particularly frazzling dinner party that ends with a wine stain on his carpet and a glass of port emptied onto one of his potted plants, he decides to kill six of them. Trudi Jordan, the masseuse he hardly knows (flamingly gay Alex Fenton brought her to dinner as the latest of his inexplicable female companions), will go first, baked to death in a sunbed at an after-hours assignation at her gym. Then Martin shifts his attention to Michael, resolving, quite without success, to murder him in a more distinctive and interesting way. Readers who go the distance with this British version of American Psycho will be vicariously refreshed with gallons of top-drawer liquor and dozens of lines of coke (at one point, Martin, features editor for a weekly arts magazine, lucks into an all-expense-paid American junket that keeps him in high style until the ugly climax), informed by numerous flashbacks to the youth of Martin as a sociopath-in-training, and regaled with several obligatory surprises. At no point, however, will their expectations about the success of Martin's enterprise be seriously perturbed. A grisly, sometimes nauseating debut, but, despite the title, never exactly audacious. .