From the reviews of Murder Book
‘This is a masterpiece of a procedural thriller . . . Unputdownable’
HARRIET CASTOR, Sunday Express
‘It [Murder Book] is complex, engrossing’
Guardian
‘Scary and convincing cast of characters and sympathetic hero’
Literary Review
‘Murder Book is neo-neo-noir, a mannerist thriller that shakes free of the period-piece mode of both Ellroy and Walter Moseley. Rayner’s book has a ’90s kind of bleakness. . .[and] a multiracial cast of characters adds a welcome up-to-date feeling’
Los Angeles Times
‘Terrific new novel. . .I am tempted to call Rayner a thinking person’s Elmore Leonard except that would do a disservice to two fine writers’
Boston Globe
‘Dense and disturbing. . .Murder Book makes a fitting companion to LA Confidential – the book and the movie – as it walks the same emotional beat as James Ellroy’s LAPD, only forty years later’
Chicago Tribune
‘This modern noir thriller has atmosphere to burn. . . a complex and meaty novel’
San Francisco Chronicle
for Päivi and the boys
With an host of furious fancies
Whereof I am commander
With a burning spear
And a horse of air
To the wilderness I wander;
By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to tourney
Ten leagues beyond
The wide world’s end —
Methinks it is no journey
— Tom o’ Bedlam’s Song, anon.
Contents