Death of a Murderer - Hardcover

'Rupert Thomson reaches the summit of his powers with his new book DEATH OF A MURDERER, a novel of beautiful moral complexity. We thought we knew Myra Hindley, and were done with her, but Thomson brings a fresh awareness of life and death to the matter, and shows, in the goodness of the telling, a wealth of the novelist's art.' Andrew O'Hagan Praise for DIVIDED KINGDOM: 'Thomson is probably the best writer of my generation wonderful and full of wonders a uniquely disturbing tale for our time.' Amanda Craig, Literary Review 'A book of real depth and superb storytelling it has 'future classic' written all over it.' Mail on Sunday 'Relentlessly compelling and enormously impressive strange, evocative and sensuous.' Daily Telegraph

Towards the end of November 2002, Billy Tyler, a police constable in his mid-forties, is summoned to the mortuary of a hospital in Suffolk. For the next twelve hours, from seven in the evening till seven in the morning, he is responsible for guarding the body of the notorious child-killer, Myra Hindley. In the face of public hostility and media frenzy, Billy's job, as his superior puts it, is to 'make sure nothing happens'. As a seasoned police officer, Billy's approach is utterly professional, but as the night wears on, in the eerie silence of the hospital, the dead woman's presence begins to assert itself, and Billy's own problems and anxieties - a stalled career, a fractious marriage, a disabled daughter - gradually acquire a new and unexpected significance. In this daring novel, Rupert Thomson takes on one of the most controversial subjects of our time and addresses the difficult questions that arise from it. Who do we love, and why? How do we protect our children? What separates us from the people we call monsters? A vivid evocation of an extraordinary moment in crime history, Death of a Murderer is one man's dark night of the soul, a gripping meditation on the fears and temptations that haunt the lives of all of us.