...exceptionally entertaining ... There’s something reptilian in Lasdun’s gaze, a coldblooded interest in furtiveness, in the lithe selfishness of the genteel. The Fall Guy reads like early Ian McEwan or late Patricia Highsmith ... Lasdun is masterly in his story’s construction. His clues never seem like clues until they bind tightly around one of the three leads. This is exactly what a literary thriller should be: intelligent, careful, swift, unsettling. Its author deserves to find more readers on these shores.
...a twisty, chilly, exquisitely written, and tautly suspenseful exploration of big ideas in the guise of a psychological thriller ... no one — neither callow one-percenters nor those who protest their excesses — is immune from Lasdun’s witheringly satiric gaze ... Lasdun’s prose is both lapidary and hypnotic.
...engaging, effortlessly readable literary thriller ... This delight to read is also a fine study in the classic unreliable narrator. Only towards the end are other characters allowed to hold mirrors up to Matthew and reflect very different visions from the one Matthew presents to the reader ... Lasdun’s writing style is clean and straightforward. All the complexity resides in character and detail. This is masterfully controlled 2am noir. Who knows what’s up with the option, but me, I’d film this one in black and white.
...[an] elegant and disturbing novel ... a thriller of manners, is written in third-person. But so adroit is Mr. Lasdun at allowing a reader access to Matthew’s past and present thoughts and feelings that it seems like a first-person narrative ... This simple-seeming novel, so graceful in its unfolding, proves dense with psychological detail and sly social observations.
The Fall Guy is good at depicting money and its way of life. There are plenty of empty conversations and some splendidly vicious parodies of food and drink jargon ... With its deftly constructed narratives of guilt and buried resentment, The Fall Guy is more accessible than Lasdun’s previous novels, and filmic to the point where it can seem like a cleverly fleshed-out screenplay. Watching Matthew, Charlie and Chloe lure one another into a trap not quite of their own making has a certain shivery fascination. But sometimes our switches of allegiance – not to say the constant provision of herrings, red or otherwise – are managed so slickly that you think of Highsmith or Hitchcock rather than the author of The Horned Man. The formal jig danced with the audience’s expectations risks a loss of sympathy for everyone involved, including Lasdun himself.
The Fall Guy can be read, easily enough, as an elevated thriller. Part made-for-Netflix thriller, part lifestyles of the rich and famous (Lasdun’s descriptions of the high-end food Matthew cooks for Charlie and Chloe are worth the price of admission alone), I can imagine it more naturally faced out at an airport bookstore than shelved in the stacks of a university library. Placed beside Lasdun’s memoir, however, it becomes something more: a journey into the psyche of a stalker by someone who has been stalked.
