Murder Book - Softcover

Rayner, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060938285 ISBN 13: 9780060938284

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2001

Synopsis

Billy McGrath, a philosopher turned top L.A. homicide detective, has consistently resisted the temptations and injustices of a corrupt system. But McGrath's dedication to the job has cost him the woman he loves and the daughter he'd die for ... and he's finally reached his breaking point.

So when the city's biggest crack dealer offers him $1 million in cash as trade for the identity of a man McGrath believes to be a stone-cold killer, he takes it. And thus begins the ruin of a good man, whose fall from grace will take him on a riveting ride through the darkness of a tarnished city, and into the deepest folds of his own soul.

About this title

About the Author:

Born in England, Richard Rayner now lives in Los Angeles. His previous books include the memoir The Blue Suit and the novels The Cloud Sketcher, L.A. Without a Map, and Murder Book. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and many other publications.

From Kirkus Reviews:

An ambitious and dauntingly convoluted noir-derived thriller from the author of The Elephant (1992) and the penitential memoir The Blue Suit (1995). Its protagonist and narrator, Billy McGrath, is a former philosophy student and now head of the LAPD's homicide division. Turned 40, divorced from the woman he still loves (herself a former cop, paralyzed in a shooting incident) and fumbling to be a decent father to his beloved preadolescent daughter, Billy takes very personally his latest case, the brutal torture murder of a local drug dealer's apparently innocent mother (``I thought,'' Billy muses, ``that if I could stop something like this from happening even once . . . then being a police officer would be worthwhile''). Not a chance. While compiling documentary evidence for the ``murder book'' the department keeps on (aforementioned victim) Mae Richards, Billy uncovers a snake's nest of erotic, political, and more generally criminal intrigue (not excluding his own corruptibility) that acquaints him with an O.J. Simpsonlike celebrity acquitted for his wife's murder, an obstetrician burdened by dubious medical (and other) ethics, and a wonderfully cold- blooded goon named Tookie Cross--and mushrooms into several more ingeniously nauseating killings. It's all highly readable, and quite capably plotted--despite embarrassingly close echoes of Chinatown, The Silence of the Lambs, any number of Dashiell Hammett novels, and, most egregiously, Richard Price's vastly superior Clockers. Furthermore, Billy McGrath is immensely likable in his innate decency and credibly human fallibility, but Rayner dilutes this fine characterization by allowing Billy to quote eminent sages at absurdly inappropriate junctures (e.g., while interrogating a suspect: ``Robert, do you know what Jung and William James had to say about human personality?''). Murder Book will make a hell of a TV miniseries, but it's too derivative and miscalculated to be a really effective novel. Not a bad try, but not the big one Rayner was obviously aiming for. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0060938285
• ISBN 13: 9780060938284
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384