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The Fall Guy by James Lasdun

Thriller

The Fall Guy

by James Lasdun

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Quick take

As the book's perspective widens, things start to veer off course, and this is where I started reading really, really fast.

Why I love it

My favorite hobby, if I'm being honest, is hyper-analyzing. I love analyzing my own life decisions as well as those of my friends. (Sometimes I even offer my own uninvited opinions —to mixed effect!) Being a habitual reader provides a welcoming outlet, a continuous stream of new 'friends' to analyze.

And in this sense, The Fall Guy is doozy! It's a deeply psychological novel where much of the action takes place inside the characters' heads. As tension builds over the course of a long hot summer at a country house in upstate New York, there was much for me to scrutinize. And when—BANG—things boil over to disastrous effect, it's that much more satisfying.

Matthew, The Fall Guy's protagonist, has been to a therapist or two, and that means he's also been instructed to assess his actions. A tumultuous upbringing saw him plucked from the English upper class when his father disappeared and left him penniless. Now, Matthew, a chef talented in the kitchen but a failure as a restauranteur, struggles to find comfortable footing in his adult years. Knowing his backstory made his insecurities endearing to me and yet, something seems a bit off with Matthew...

When Matthew heads to his cousin Charlie's summer home, presumably to provide entertainment and delicious meals for Charlie and his wife, harmless miscommunications fester and old harmful family dynamics reemerge. This is the stuff of amazing armchair-therapist fodder. At first, I read the book slowly, wondering if Matthew's grasp on his own motivations and others' actions was as accurate as he himself seems to think.

At a certain point, as the book's perspective widens, things start to veer off course, and this is where I started reading really, really fast. To put it briefly: shit hits the fan. Though the fan is totally not what you think, it's like a different fan in a different room, or maybe a different house altogether. That, my friends, is how the second half of this book catches you off guard, changes gears, and becomes a thriller.

To the credit of James Lasdun's amazing and unexpected character development, I had a lot wrong. I don't want to rob you of the enjoyment of uncovering this book's secrets on your own. The enjoyment is real, it's well-earned, and it might result in you reading the second half of the novel approximately 8x faster than you read the first. Meanwhile, I'll be over here learning how to knit.

Member ratings (1,519)

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View all
The Boyfriend
The Last One at the Wedding
Sleep Tight
First Lie Wins
House of Glass
Middle of the Night
Listen for the Lie
A Talent for Murder
Beautiful Ugly
Someone in the Attic
One Perfect Couple
Like Mother, Like Daughter
Kill for Me, Kill for You
Bad Tourists
Murder Road
Daughter of Mine
The Fury
The Other Mothers
When I’m Dead
The Soulmate
What Lies in the Woods
She Started It
The Only One Left
Dark Corners
Blacktop Wasteland
All the Dangerous Things
The Only Survivors
The Broken Girls
The Family Game
The Push
We Were Never Here
Things We Do in the Dark
The Golden Couple
The Stranger Upstairs
Gone Tonight
Too Good to Be True
The Last Word
You Are Not Alone
Rock Paper Scissors
Not a Happy Family
A Flicker in the Dark
Reckless Girls
The House Across the Lake
The Last Thing He Told Me
The Maidens
Everything We Didn't Say
The Paris Apartment
You're Invited
The Last Party
Dark Places
Pieces of Her
The Wife Between Us
Sharp Objects
None of This Is True
The Silent Patient
The Other Woman
Necessary People
The Family Upstairs
The Night Swim
Girl A
The Hunting Wives
Just Another Missing Person
First Born
The Lies I Tell
Breathless