Death of a Murderer
From AwardAnnals
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| Author(s) | Rupert Thomson |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | A Novel |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing PLC |
| Honors | |
| In November 2002, police constable Billy Tyler 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’. 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. | |
Rupert Thomson—“a true master,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle—now gives us his most powerful work yet: the story of a woman who, even after her death, inflames an entire nation, and of the man who comes under her spell.
Having spent decades in prison for crimes gruesomely familiar to everyone in England, this murderer has finally died of natural causes but is no less notorious in death than she was in life. Billy Tyler, a career policeman, has been assigned the task of guarding her body—to make sure, he’s told, that nothing happens. But alone on a graveyard shift his wife begged him not to accept, Billy has occasion to contemplate the various turns his life has taken, his complicated thoughts about violence in himself and society, the unease that distances him from marital disappointment and a damaged daughter, and, finally, why it is that this reviled murderer, in the eerie silence of the hospital morgue, seems to speak to him directly and know him more fully than anyone else. In this dark night of the soul, his own problems and anxieties gradually acquire a new and unexpected significance, giving rise to questions that should haunt us all: Whom do we love, and why? How do we protect our children? And what separates us from those we call monsters?
A gripping revelation of crime, of punishment—and of what we desperately seek to hide from ourselves.
