Mr. Peanut
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
David Pepin has loved his wife since the moment they met, and he can't imagine living without her - yet he obsessively contemplates her demise. Soon she's dead, and he's both deeply distraught and the prime suspect.
The detectives investigating her death have their own conjugal difficulties. Ward Hastroll's wife is inexplicably, voluntarily bedridden. And Sam Sheppard has for decades been especially sensitive to the intricacies of marital guilt, for the most personal of reasons....
When Pepin is linked to a hitman, the case begins to resemble the Escher drawings that inspire the computer games Pepin designs for a living. Mesmerizing, hugely poignant, astonishing in its reach, Mr. Peanut is a police procedural of the soul and a first novel of the highest order.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ross's inspired debut explores the proximity of violence and love and begins with the death of Alice Pepin, whose lifelong struggle with depression, insecurity, and obesity comes to an abrupt end at her kitchen table when she is found dead with a peanut lodged in her throat. She has suffered suicide by anaphylactic shock or so claims her husband, David, a quiet computer game programmer obsessed with M.C. Escher, Hitchcock, and working and re-working a draft of his unpublished novel, a violent possible masterpiece. Gradually, the two detectives on the case begin to see disturbing parallels between their own marital dramas and the Pepins' cruel rotations of brinkmanship and adoration. Ross's depiction of love is grotesque and tender at once, and his style is commanding as he combines torture and romance to create a sense of vertigo-as-romance. It's a unique book stark and sublime, creepy and fearless that readers into the darker end of the literary spectrum won't want to miss.
