Shrouded - Softcover

Carol Anne Davis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1899344179 ISBN 13: 9781899344178

Publisher: Dufour Editions, 1997

Synopsis

Douglas likes women - quiet women; the kind he deals with at the mortuary where he works.
Douglas meets Marjorie, unemployed, gaining weight and losing confidence. She talks and laughs a lot to cover up her shyness, but what Douglas really needs is a lover who'll stay still - deadly still.
Driven by lust and fear, Douglas finds a way to make girls remain excitingly silent and inert. But then he is forced to blank out the details of their unplanned deaths.
Perhaps only Marjorie can fulfil his growing sexual hunger. If he could just get her into a state of limbo. Douglas studies his textbooks to find a way...

About this title

About the Author:

'The Queen Of Noir' - Booklist Carol Anne Davis is the author of Shrouded, Safe As Houses and Noise Abatement and the true crime Women Who Kill: Profiles Of Female Serial Killers. Her true crime features and reviews appear in monthly magazines and she's appeared at various literary events including Crime Scene, Dead On Deansgate and St Hilda's College, Oxford. Her most recent dark crime novel Kiss It Away was published in autumn 2003 and the paperback of her true crime book Children Who Kill in April 2004. Couples Who Kill : Profiles Of Deviant Duos was published in March 2005.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Twenty years after his goldfish dies and he stops loving his mother or anybody else, Douglas Tate is working as an Edinburgh undertaker. It's a good job for Douglas, because he's always been most comfortable with people--especially women--who don't cling to him or talk back or move very much at all. When his mother and his abusive stepfather leave for Australia and Douglas is left for the first time in his own bed-sit, it looks as if he'll finally be free to make his perfect match with Marjorie Milton, whose asthma and shyness conspire to make her as passive as Douglas might wish. But a chance encounter with a prostitute awakens desires that are hideously, comically at odds with Douglas's reserved comportment--and as he keeps meeting Marjorie at the Fish Are Fun evenings (where the abortive lovers talk earnestly of keeping aquariums stocked with companions even more quiet than they are), he privately agonizes whether there isn't some way he can keep Marjorie all to himself, as still and silent as one of his clients as Reevon's Funeral Parlor. . . . No real surprises in this pathological debut (a lot more ruminative and creepy than Do-Not's recent offerings). But Davis creates a marvelously mundane context for her frightened hero's murderous fantasies. Following the progress of his necrophiliac romance is like watching the Titanic and the iceberg glide inexorably toward each other. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dufour Editions
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 1899344179
• ISBN 13: 9781899344178
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 212