90% of my friends have been dead for hundreds of years. They speak to me profoundly in ways that organisms encountered in everyday life do not. By the alchemy of the written word they reach out behind the black cloak of time. Breakfast with David Hume, lunch with Baruch Spinoza, supper with Arthur Schopenhauer, evening with Epicurus. Their minds matter. None of them had a twit account, but to me they are the beautiful dead.
Contemporary tastes tend more to the bloodthirsty and gore, as testified by retail sales and library loans patterns. For a spectacle of a different kind of beautiful dead, reach for this crime novel by Belinda Bauer. The summary is as follows. Eve Singer’s career as a TV crime reporter is flagging, and she realises there is a dividend for her in the fact that a serial killer is plying his bloody trade in London. But the murderer (who sees himself as an artist) is soon counting on Eve to showcase his gruesome performances.
For a package of the witty, scabrous, and grisly it’s time to enquire at your local library or consult https://www.amazon.co.uk/Beautiful-Dead-Belinda-Bauer/dp/059307551X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1481969115&sr=8-1&keywords=beautiful+dead+bauer for further bibliographic detail.
Belinda Bauer (http://www.belindabauer.co.uk/) is a former journalist and screenwriter, having won the Carl Foreman BAFTA for her screenplay The Locker Room.
352 pages in Bantam Press
First published 2016
ISBN 978-0593075517
Belinda Bauer