The Fall Guy

Starred review from August 8, 2016
At the start of this terrific novel of suspense from Lasdun (Seven Lies), Matthew, an unemployed chef, and his cousin Charlie, a successful Wall Streeter, drive from New York City to Charlie’s vacation house in the Catskills. Charlie has invited Matthew, who’s almost like a brother, to spend the summer with him and his wife, Chloe. Matthew believes that the summer will be restorative, but the pastoral retreat is anything but as the gap in social status between him and Charlie becomes more pronounced. The tension rises when Matthew, essentially a private chef for the couple, begins to suspect Chloe of infidelity. The verboten topics of class and money hover over this literate tale of love, jealousy, and revenge. As one character notes, money is “inextricably linked to the one source of guilt and shame... the sense that you’ve stolen another person’s labor.” An undercurrent of menace and threat finally erupts, and Lasdun presents the inexorable turnings of fate in a subtle and disconcerting way. Agent: Irene Skolnick, Irene Skolnick Literary Agency.

December 5, 2016
In his new novel of psychological suspense, set in 2012, poet-author Lasdun places Matthew, a young, out-of-work chef, under a literary microscope, catching every disturbing twitch of his increasing discomfort as he spends a long summer at the Catskill Mountain vacation home of his wealthy stockbroker cousin Charlie and Charlie’s beautiful wife, Chloe. In return, Matthew agrees to be the couple’s live-in chef. He’s a former Londoner, feeling adrift, and, in addition to providing him with a consistent British accent, reader Constant catches the character’s soft-spoken sense of aimlessness and, even more crucial, his exaggerated sensitivity. Lasdun spins his tale slowly and carefully, increasing Matthew’s growing tension by degrees until, eventually, it jumps into the red zone after he discovers Chloe’s affair with filmmaker Wade Grollier, a burly extrovert. Constant’s presentation of Wade, with his effectively rendered Deep South accent, complements the character’s easygoing and amusing nature, while Constant’s hard-edged, fast-paced description of events preceding the murder is quite the opposite. Lasdun and Constant make it clear who kills whom, but we’re left to decide who’s guilty, who’s innocent, and who fills the role of the fall guy. A Norton hardcover.