Bill Pronzini: Blue Lonesome

By MICHELE HEWITSON

The wonderful Edward Hopper cover of Pronzini's lovely, moody little thriller perfectly captures the isolation and unfulfilled lives Pronzini paints with his laconic prose.

Jim Messenger is an accountant whose career is defined by "apathy motivated by complacency". He is attracted to a woman with eyes that are "almost but not quite dead".

"No, it wasn't attraction but rather a kind of seductive bewilderment. No one is born that hurt."

His journey to find out what caused that hurt leads him to a claustrophobic desert town in Nevada where nobody wants him to find out the truth. The ending's trite, but tumbleweed and rattlesnakes have seldom been more hypnotic.

Canongate Press

$34.95