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In this taut psychological thriller, a couple and their houseguest find themselves caught in a deadly web of secrets, obsession, and revenge.

It is summer, 2012. Charlie, a wealthy banker with an uneasy conscience, invites his troubled cousin Matthew to visit him and his wife in their idyllic mountaintop house. As the days grow hotter, the friendship between the three begins to reveal its fault lines, and with the arrival of a fourth character, the household finds itself suddenly in the grip of uncontrollable passions. As readers of James Lasdun’s acclaimed fiction can expect, The Fall Guy is a complex moral tale as well as a gripping suspense story, probing questions of guilt and betrayal with ruthless incisiveness. Who is the real victim here? Who is the perpetrator? And who, ultimately, is the fall guy? Darkly vivid, with an atmosphere of erotic danger, The Fall Guy is Lasdun’s most entertaining novel yet.

Exceptionally entertaining. . . . The Fall Guy reads like early Ian McEwan or late Patricia Highsmith. . . . This is exactly what a literary thriller should be: intelligent, careful, swift, unsettling. [Lasdun] deserves to find more readers on these shores.


Elegant and disturbing. . . . This simple-seeming novel, so graceful in its unfolding, proves dense with psychological detail and sly social observations.

Aptly described as the literary descendant of Dostoevsky and Patricia Highsmith. . . . The Fall Guy is a twisty, chilly, exquisitely written, and tautly suspenseful exploration of big ideas in the guise of a psychological thriller.


Superbly engaging and intelligent psychological thriller. . . . A compulsively readable tale of money, power, and betrayal.
— Lionel Shriver

Expertly playing the noir card, Lasdun dissects the mercurial relationships among a wealthy financier, his photographer wife and an aimless cousin during a long hot summer in upstate New York. There are plenty of lies and betrayals in this stylish thriller, but it’s the slow burn of obsession that makes it sing.

As the pages turn, the nervous tension ticks ever higher in Lasdun’s combustible psychological thriller.

Exquisitely written yet propulsively entertaining all at the same time. . . a journey into the psyche of a stalker by someone who has been stalked.

[A] terrific novel of suspense. . . Lasdun presents the inexorable turnings of fate in a subtle and disconcerting way.

James Lasdun is the author of Afternoon of a Faun, The Fall Guy, The Horned Man, Seven Lies, several poetry and short story collections, and a memoir. He lives in Brooklyn.