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Searching... West Salem Branch Library | Hogan, P. | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
IN THE TRADITION OF PATRICIA HIGHSMITH'S TOM RIPLEY NOVELS COMES A
DELICIOUSLY UNSETTLING TALE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL SUSPENSE THAT DELVES
INTO THE MIND OF A MAN WITH A CHILLING DOUBLE LIFE.
Mr. Heming loves the leafy English village where he lives. As a local real estate agent, he knows every square inch of the town and sees himself as its protector, diligent in enforcing its quaint charm. Most people don't pay much attention to Mr. Heming; he is someone who fades easily into the background. But Mr. Heming pays attention to them. You see, he has the keys to their homes. In fact, he has the keys to every home he's ever sold in town. Over the years, he has kept them all so that he can observe his neighbors, not just on the street, but behind locked doors.
Mr. Heming considers himself a connoisseur of the private lives of others. He is witness to the minutiae of their daily lives, the objects they care about, the secrets they keep. As details emerge about a troubled childhood, Mr. Heming's disturbing hobby begins to form a clear pattern, and the reasons behind it come into focus. But when the quiet routine of the village is disrupted by strange occurrences, including a dead body found in the backyard of a client's home, Mr. Heming realizes it may only be a matter of time before his secrets are found out. A brilliant portrait of one man's obsession, A Pleasure and a Calling is a darkly funny and utterly transfixing tale that will hold you under its spell.
Author Notes
PHIL HOGAN was born in a small town in northern England, and now lives in a small town in southern England. A journalist for twenty-five years, he has written for The Observer and The Guardian . He is married with four children.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
British writer Hogan's fourth novel (after All This Will Be Yours) is a gripping psychological thriller that pegs out the creep-o-meter with its chilling, original plot. Mr. Heming is a real estate agent in an English village, very successful, very curious, and very dangerous. He has sold hundreds of houses in 17 years and has kept the keys to all of them. He uses the keys to enter homes and spy, obsessively and surreptitiously interjecting himself into the homeowners' lives, occasionally altering things for his own amusement, learning everything about each family: "I squeezed the juice out of them, though they didn't know it." Mr. Heming doesn't think of himself as a stalker or voyeur, and he doesn't consider himself a thief. He is, however, a man who will act decisively if threatened or even merely annoyed. His orderly life is suddenly complicated when he becomes smitten with Abigail Rice, a young woman to whom he sold a house. Abigail is involved with a philandering predator-a married man named Douglas Sharp, another one of Mr. Heming's clients. Mr. Heming decides that Sharp must be removed, and, with his customary thoroughness, the realtor decides to discredit Sharp, but his complex plan takes a deadly turn. Hogan's Mr. Heming is a monumentally diabolical character-the fact that he narrates the story further ups both the stakes and the tension. Readers won't soon forget this first-rate, white-knuckle suspense novel. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
William Heming sells real estate, but that's not his only pursuit in this dark first-person tale by English journalist Hogan.To say that Heming's past was difficult is an understatement: His mother died in childbirth, his baby brother "disappeared," and his cousin, Isobel, despises him, leaving Heming to be cared for by his aunt Lillian, who finds the young man repulsive. After one incident too many, he's shipped off to boarding school, where his strangeness gets him into all sorts of trouble. Heming loves to steal keys and let himself into other people's homes, including the rooms occupied by fellow students and teachers. But he's not simply looking around; he likes to handle other people's belongings, steal them and sometimes make himself at home. Eventually, he's tossed from school and finds a job as an estate agent. When he encounters a rude dog walker one day, he decides to exact revenge. Since he keeps the keys to all the houses he's ever sold, he still has the one that opens the man's door, so he sneaks inside and leaves a "gift" that sets off a dramatic and deadly chain of events. In Heming's character, Hogan has created a memorably creepy sociopath whose eloquent defense of behavior that most civilized people would find repellant only serves to illustrate the extent of his breaks with reality and, along with it, conventional behavior. Heming also hints at terrible past crimes, generously leaving the reader to fill in the blanks when it comes to both the mechanics and exact outcomes. Hogan skillfully builds a character that combines Mr. Goodbar, Hannibal Lector and Moriarty, but in doing so, he offers the reader little in the way of resolution. Deft characterization, but reading about someone this relentlessly unconscionable will make most readers lunge for the shower as soon as they've reached the final page. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The premise is innocuous enough; William Heming is a real-estate agent who helps people buy and sell their homes in a small English town. But Heming keeps the keys to every property he has ever listed and snoops on all the occupants, and he is no ordinary Peeping Tom; he lies in wait for the residence to be unoccupied, and then moves in, however briefly, to enjoy the private space and smells, perusing mail, computers, refrigerators, and more. As he puts it, Among strangers' belongings is where I am most at home. In Hogan's hands, even that is acceptable. Slowly Heming's life unfurls in flashbacks, from early nightmarish childhood through sinister adulthood, and Hogan ups the creepiness a notch with each passing page in this totally engrossing story. When Heming takes it upon himself to serve justice, to right what he perceives as wrongs, we can't help but root for our hero until we discover he may be taking justice a bit too far, which really ratchets up the suspense. Yet somehow we keep hoping he will make his escape, while also hoping he will get caught, and that dichotomy proves simply delicious and addicting. William Heming joins the ranks of unforgettable, unreliable narrators in this gloriously creepy novel of psychological suspense.--Alesi, Stacy Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
PICKING UP ONE of Charles Todd's post-World War I historical mysteries is like starting off on an uncertain journey. In each book, Inspector Ian Rutledge of Scotland Yard, a shellshocked veteran of the Great War, makes his solitary way to some provincial English town, ostensibly to assist the local constabulary with a baffling crime but also to bear witness to the incalculable devastation brought about by the fighting. In 16 previous novels, the authors (a mother and son who write under a pen name) have sent their haunted hero all over the country, taking stock of the terrible desolation he sees everywhere and knowing that true justice is beyond his powers. A FINE SUMMER'S DAY (Morrow/HarperCollins, $26.99) is a bittersweet gift to longtime readers of this wonderful series, a prequel that opens in 1914 on one of those perfect English days, "peaceful, measured, and like the Empire, destined to go on forever" - the sort of day a carefree young man like Rutledge would choose to propose to his beloved. And it's just bad luck it also happens to be the day the Austrian archduke and his wife are assassinated in Sarajevo. This intimate look into the personal life of a detective we've known only as a damaged soul is no small gift. Rutledge's only serious concern, for the moment, is how to squire his fiancée to all those festive engagement parties when he's constantly called away to investigate a series of inexplicable murders. Although that mystery is intelligently developed and fairly resolved, the greater gift here is the portrait it presents of England before the war - and before young ladies began urging their men to march off to France. "I don't want everyone thinking you're a coward," Rutledge's fiancée declares. But on that fine June day, England was lovely, a land of "fields and meadows, distant church towers and green countryside," and life was simple. A man could take pride in his work as a farmer or a barber or a furniture maker, and although a woman couldn't vote or serve on a jury, she was far more influential than her husband when it came to village life. Girls played lawn games, and boys were boys. "They rambled, they fished, they went to the seaside, hunted birds' nests," and they had all the time in the world to grow up. EIGHT SENECA CLAN mothers ("stronger and older than law") go up against the organized crime elders of upstate New York in a STRING OF BEADS (Mysterious Press/ Grove/Atlantic, $26), another excellently engineered thriller from Thomas Perry featuring Jane Whitefield, a Seneca Indian who has made a career of helping others escape from danger. The clan mothers summon Jane to track down her childhood friend Jimmy Sanders, who has foolishly fled the Tonawanda Reservation after being falsely charged with the murder of some jerk who started a fight with him in a bar. After a grueling hike to an archaeological site in Pennsylvania they had visited as teenagers, she finds her old friend waiting. When their trek home is rudely interrupted by mob enforcers dispatched to kill Jimmy, Jane summons all her survival skills to teach him how to make himself invisible. There can be several steps to this transformation, from simple alterations in appearance (carrying a book makes a great disguise) to the demanding pursuit of a new profession. But taking on a new identity is a tricky business, and while Jimmy seems liberated by the challenge, Jane finds herself drawn deeper into her clan identity and her neglected cultural heritage. All this soul-searching and car chases too. What more could we ask from an escape artist like Perry? THE WORD "CREEPY" (attached to descriptive adverbs like "insanely" and "diabolically" or even "deliciously") immediately comes to mind after a quick dip into a PLEASURE AND A CALLING (Picador, $25), a psychological suspense novel by Phil Hogan about a real estate broker who keeps a set of keys to all the homes he's sold in the past 17 years. William Heming, who narrates his own story in a prim, professorial tone, fancies himself a patron of his pretty little English town, and to this end will periodically slip into a house to monitor the lives of its residents. Insisting that he's no stalker or voyeur, Heming sees himself in a more godlike guise, the benevolent overseer who will change a light bulb or rewire a loose connection. "I am happy on the fringes," he insists, "listening and watching, excitedly awaiting your next move." But when someone steps out of line, he'll stop at nothing, not even murder, to keep his kingdom all to himself. THE SOUL OF DISCRETION (Overlook, $26.95) subverts all our assumptions about Lafferton, the pleasant cathedral town where Susan Hill sets her civilized mysteries featuring Chief Superintendent Simon Serrailler. Who knew that lovely Lafferton had a mean side, a neighborhood where residents were often awakened by children screaming in the night? And who would dream that the Honorable Will Fernley, third son of Lord Fernley, would be arrested and sent to prison for his participation in a sophisticated pedophile ring that's operating in the area? In a daring move to track down the leaders and bankrollers of this sleazy organization, Serrailler goes undercover as a convicted pedophile in the experimental "therapeutic community" where Fernley is doing time. Be assured that our hero's depressing experience will have a sobering effect on the whole town.
Library Journal Review
An unsettling premise and a dose of perverse humor highlight this entertaining psychological mystery. Real estate agent Mr. Heming has sold hundreds of homes in his quaint English village and, with copies of keys he makes of each, he revisits them often, unbeknownst to the homeowners. His fetish appears harmless until an obsession with a particular young woman and a murder complicate things. Narrator Michael Page gives a brilliant delivery, lending Heming's twisted thoughts a sense of normality as experienced through his complacent nature. -VERDICT This compulsory tale will appeal to fans of psychological fiction in the vein of Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell.-Phillip Oliver, Univ. of North Alabama Lib., Florence © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.