Bad to the Bone (Dedalus Hall of Fame) - Softcover

Waddington, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1909232912 ISBN 13: 9781909232914

Publisher: Dedalus Limited, 2016

Synopsis

'Waddington employs a cheerful surrealism to convey the superhuman status of his cyclists and the designer violence of his killer. The encounters with death are funny rather than frightening and the narrator is omnipotent, stylish and amused. Waddington's descriptions of racing, and they are many and enthralling, have the rhythm and intensity of poetry. You're riding with your wheel an inch from the author's, carried along by the surge of the pack, normal life and normal people no more than a muted clamour on the roadside. It's exhilarating stuff.'

Joe Cogan in The Independent on Sunday

'Racy thriller in which top pros in the Tour de France become ensnared in a Faustian pact with a sports doctor who guarantees success but demands the ultimate price: their lives. Appeared in 1998, the year of the sport's biggest ever drug scandal... it still seems grimly apposite.'

William Fotheringham's Top 10 Cycling Novels in The Guardian

About this title

About the Author:

James Waddington is a playwright living in the North of England. He divides his time between writing and cycling. Bad to the Bone is his only novel.

From Kirkus Reviews:

British playwright Waddingtons manic, stylishly bizarre first novel glories in a Faustian pact between a Spanish professional cyclist and an evil sports doctor. Whos been murdering Europe's best professional cyclists? After the disappearance of the brain-dead body of a biker who seems then to have died accidently and the discovery of the bloodless, brainless pieces of a fellow cyclist in a remote mountain village, cynically philosophical police detective Gabriela Gomelez questions Akil S enz, a handsome Spaniard who ranks among the top riders in the world. Blessed with superlatively good looks, a sexually magnetic wife, Perlita de Zubia, and enough money to live in luxury for the rest of his life, S enz can offer no clues or even an explanation other than the grudging admission that any cyclist will do just about anything to become the best. Fellow biker Patrul Azafr n, who is having a passionate affair with Perlita (of which everyone but her husband is aware), suspects that S enz is not above temptation after seeing him in the company of the bearded, impeccably tailored sports doctor and team manager Mikkel Fleischman, whose suspiciously steaming briefcases just might contain an illicit substance that transforms a merely gifted cyclist into an unbeatable speed machine. The downside is that the substance also seems to drive its users insane. When another speed-machine cyclist is found hanging from a cliff, portions of his skull and body expertly flayed, Azafr n suspects that the cases may be linked because all the corpses have had their brains removed. When a suddenly paranoid S enz joins Fleischman's team and begins winning with diabolical ease, he also suspectsand fearsthat his best friend is lost. While participating in a series of vividly depicted races, Azafr n hopes to send Fleischman back to hell before he destroys S enz completely. Feverishly hyperbolic thrill ride that, despite tiresome histrionics and postmodern posturing, brilliantly exposes the darkness of soul lurking in the most gifted of champions. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dedalus Limited
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1909232912
• ISBN 13: 9781909232914
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 194