Rupert Thomson, Death of a Murderer

For my money Rupert Thomson is one of the most adventurous and consistently dazzling writers working today. He’s also criminally underrated (and largely unknown) in the United States. His 1996 novel, The Insult, featured one of the great untrustworthy narrators in recent memory: a man, blinded by a bullet to the head, who suffers from a rare neurological condition that convinces him that he can still see. The result was a sort of surreal noir in which apparent delusions seemed very real and very spooky.

His latest work, Death of a Murderer, features a policeman haunted by the ghost of a notorious serial murderer, and it’s already being hailed by British reviewers as Thomson’s masterpiece.