A Personal History of Thirst - Softcover

John Burdett

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0340660805 ISBN 13: 9780340660805

Publisher: Coronet, 1996

Synopsis

A me+a7nage a+a6 trois that unites an ambitious London lawyer, a sexually inventive American woman, and a thief named Thirst culminates in a perverse obsession that ends with a courtroom confrontation. A first novel.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

``You never get free. Never.'' That's the despairing statement of Oliver Thirst, the career criminal whose murder on a London street sets this ambitious but flawed first novel in motion. Among the suspects in Thirst's death is James Knight, a barrister so accomplished that he is about to be named a Queen's Counsel. Burdett, who has practiced law in London, renders the details of a trial attorney's life with precision, vigor, and with obvious relish for the peculiar byways of the law. Knight, as a young barrister scrabbling for cases, had managed to save Thirst from a lengthy jail term. Against his better judgment, he is talked into taking a further interest in Thirst, who, having sworn off crime, has enrolled in the university. Both men are cockneys, both are intelligent, both are ``straining every nerve to move up a few strata in British society.'' Knight does rise but Thirst gradually slips from failure to self-pity to a career as a drug dealer catering to the appetites of the trendier echelons of London society. He also manages to seduce Knight's sensual, amoral wife, Daisy, and eventually to marry her. Daisy is arrested for Thirst's murder (he had been an ingeniously abusive husband, and she had been photographed practicing her marksmanship on a shooting range), and Knight comes to her defense. Burdett's trial scenes are terse, often mordantly funny, always convincing. But Thirst never comes to life: He remains more a collection of grievances than a character. And the series of revelations at the climax about Knight's past life and motives seem more baffling than illuminating. Burdett, in attempting to turn our perceptions of the novel's events inside out, only confuses. Still, his unblinking eye--his characters are sketched in with great shrewdness -- and his exact, resonant style make one hope that next time he'll rely less on surprise, more on narrative. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Former lawyer Burdett's first novel cleverly exploits a love triangle to highlight the mordant ironies of the British class system. Couched in terms of psychological intrigue, this three-part thriller uncovers deception involving ambitious James Knight, a defender turned prosecutor; Oliver Thirst, his former client; and Daisy Smith, an Anglomaniac American. In the first part, Daisy is charged with Oliver's murder. The second part is a flashback to the late 1970s, which establishes and develops the dark triangle. James, Oliver and Daisy all seek escape from their respective places in society. James, not being of blue-blood public-school stock, feels an outsider in the legal ranks even as he rises to the verge of receiving silks as a Queen's Counsel. That's when Oliver, trying to polish his native intelligence with schooling in order to escape the streets, reenters his life. Though it's unethical to continue contact with a former client, not to mention socially inadvisable to step down the class ladder for tea, James does so because of a secret in his own past. Meanwhile, Daisy is trying to erase the memory of a brutally abusive father while her British mother moves towards a devastating end. A convoluted strategem fabricated to free Daisy hides several sinister truths as the final battle of wits ensues in Daisy's trial, which consumes much of the third and most compelling-and funny-part of the novel. As legal machinations and revelations of cunning duplicity mount, Burdett drives his sharp-eyed amorality tale to its startling conclusion.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Coronet
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0340660805
• ISBN 13: 9780340660805
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320