Thomas Martin was a devoted family man who had all the trappings of an enviable life: a beautiful wife and daughter, a well-appointed home on Long Island's north shore, a job at a prestigious Manhattan advertising firm. But what happens when Thomas' fragile ego is rocked? After committing an unspeakable act—that he can never undo—Thomas grapples with his sense of self.
...simultaneously nightmarish and utterly compelling; she perfectly captures the voice of a man who does not recognize his own privilege, who thinks he is trying his best but is really doing his worst. As A Good Man speeds toward its violent conclusion, readers will be captivated. A masterful, suspenseful tale told by an ultimate unreliable narrator.
... chillingly good ... infused with a low-grade dread from the very first page ... Katz has delivered a whip-smart, beautifully written meditation on marriage, masculinity and the thin line between happiness and disaster.
... by the end of the first 20 pages, debut author Ani Katz has racked up a whole armoury over the mantelpiece. If you were to guess where all this is heading, it’s highly likely that you’d be right: every single narrative gun (or billy club) goes off in exactly the way you would expect. For some, perhaps that will be a recommendation ... No one is likely to call A Good Man problematic, no matter how unpleasant the events it describes. What Katz gains in political clarity, though, she loses in artistry. The novel is deeply atmospheric and morbidly compelling, with a near-total commitment to character that suggests a powerful talent. But fiction needs problems and ambiguity and – when writing about unsettling things – a willingness to lead the reader into moral peril. The most enduring monsters are the ones we have to acknowledge as partly ourselves ... While Thomas is obviously bad, none of the women in his life reaches the level of characterisation where we might feel something for them beyond the pity due to victims. This is a problem created by first-person narration, but it is also a problem that can be solved, as Jackson and Nabokov show. Without that tension of sympathies, however accomplished this novel is in many ways, it leaves nothing of itself when the last page is turned.
