The Book Of Evidence

Freddie Montgomery is on trial for a murder he committed because he could. Finding himself without sufficient funds to pay back a debt, and leaving his wife and child behind as collateral on a Mediterranean island, Montgomery has returned to Ireland after years of self-imposed exile to raise the money. But all sources appear to have dried up. Even the few pictures his family owned have been sold off. In a blindly desperate attempt to get back one of those paintings, he bludgeons a young girl and hides from the police, implicating an old family friend before he is caught. How did he with his background, education, culture-come to this?
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The Book of Evidence presents the en- grossing testimony of an improbable murderer, offering not evidence of his innocence, but of his life. In startlingly fluid prose, at once coldly terrifying and darkly funny, the narrative reveals an articulate villain whose amorality is as much a revelation to himself as his humanity is to us.