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Summary
Summary
NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
A literary crime thriller with "a clever plot that always surprises, told with dark humor and dry wit" ( The New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice), this brilliant debut follows a famous author whose wife--the brains behind his success--meets an untimely death, leaving him to deal with the consequences.
Henry Hayden seems like someone you might admire, or even come to think of as a friend. A famous bestselling author. A loving and devoted husband. A generous and considerate neighbor. But Henry Hayden is a construction, a mask. His past is a secret, his methods more so. Only he and his wife know that she is the actual writer of the novels that made him famous.
When his hidden-in-plain-sight mistress becomes pregnant, it seems his carefully conceived façade is about to crumble. And on a rain-soaked night at the edge of a dangerous cliff, his permanent solution becomes his most terrible mistake.
Now not only are the police after Henry but his past--which he has painstakingly kept hidden--threatens to catch up with him as well. Henry is an ingenious man, and he works out an ingenious plan, weaving lies, truths, and half-truths into a story that might help him survive. Still, the noose tightens.
Smart, sardonic, and compulsively readable, this is the story of a man whose cunning allows him to evade the consequences of his every action, even when he's standing on the edge of the abyss.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
German scriptwriter Arango's exceptional first novel, a highly entertaining thriller, focuses on Henry Hayden, a successful author who lives in a "nondescript coastal town." Wealthy beyond imagination, he appears to be a loving husband to his wife, Martha, and is so humble that people automatically like him. In truth, the vain and selfish Henry is seeing a mistress, Betty Hansen, who's also his editor, and a few other women besides. As for those bestsellers, Henry never wrote one word-Martha did, allowing him to take credit as long as her authorial role remained a secret. Henry's carefully constructed world is in danger when Betty becomes pregnant. His decision to take drastic action results in an accidental death. Dodging the police inquiry and an old acquaintance determined to expose his erratic past, Henry takes charge of his own fate. Wry humor punctuates this insightful look at a soulless man. Agent: Kim Witherspoon, Inkwell Management, on behalf of Michael Heyward, Text Publishing. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Having become a famous author by publishing his wife's brilliant crime novels with his name on the cover, Henry Hayden creates his own devious fictions to avoid detection in a series of mysterious deaths. Psychologically damaged since childhoodwhen his father, who abused him for bed-wetting, tripped down the basement stairs and died on the same day his mother disappearedHayden is a drifter with no human connections. Waking up hung over after sleeping with a stranger, Martha, he discovers a manuscript under her bed and is so impressed that he sends it off to publishers as his own. Martha, an oddball who writes books in the middle of the night and tosses the perfectly composed manuscripts in the cellar, is fine with that. After Hayden marries her, the first novel becomes a huge bestseller. Living large with a sports car and fancy clothes, he has an affair with his editor, Betty, who becomes pregnant with his child. It's only a matter of time, or so it seems, before he's exposed for the fake he is. But he remains master of his made-up world, even with the police breathing down his neck after first Martha and then Betty disappear and even with a stalker who knows everything about his past seeking vengeance. A cross between James M. Cain and Patricia Highsmith, with a wide streak of sardonic humor, this is one wicked tale. You keep waiting for the author to slip, plot-wise, but, as with his protagonist, you wait in vain. German screenwriter Arango's first novel is superior pulp, with schemers all around and plenty to say about fame, identity, and mortality. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Best-selling author Henry Hayden is as famous for his novels as for his winning personality. He is modest about his success and appears the perfectly devoted husband to his wife of many years. Beneath the polished veneer, however, lies a very different story, indeed. When his mistress becomes pregnant, and the truth threatens to leak, Henry commits a crime with shockingly unexpected consequences. Then, as the police close in, and secrets about his writing and his past threaten to surface, Henry constructs lie after lie to avoid being caught. It isn't long before the entire complex web he has woven threatens to collapse, but Henry is inventive, if nothing else he is purported to be, and he is not giving up without at least a duel of wits. Arango uses dark humor to probe the depths of human depravity in Henry's borderline psychotic profile. Fans of psychological thrillers will be eager to see whether Henry's increasingly detailed spin job will protect him or if the chaos he has created will blow his own cover.--Ophoff, Cortney Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"YOU CAN ALWAYS count on a murderer for a fancy prose style," says Humbert Humbert in "Lolita." Humbert is a pedophile and a murderer. Henry Hayden (another H. H.), the protagonist of "The Truth and Other Lies," by Sascha Arango, is merely a murderer, though, like Humbert, a man of discernment. He's a world-famous, best-selling novelist, with millions of copies sold around the world, a winner of awards and a recipient of honorary degrees. He drives a Maserati, wears expensive suits and lives in splendor in a coastal town in, apparently, Germany. But it's all a fraud. He doesn't write the books that have made him rich; his wife, Martha, does, and she doesn't want any credit. She's a synesthetic recluse who just wants to be left alone to write in peace. He's also been cheating on her for years, most recently with a young editor at his publishing house. As the story opens, his mistress reveals that she's pregnant. He looks at the ultrasound with disgust and fantasizes about driving a car over a cliff and killing her and himself. He imagines killing her with a rock. This all in the first few pages. We are not meant to like Henry Hayden. Yet he's seriously weighing the pros and cons of a more honest life - not a better life, but a life of more straightforward, uncomplicated villainy. Should he tell his wife about his long affair with Betty? Should he tell Betty he's not the author of the crime thrillers that have brought him such adulation? He's certainly not going to leave his wife, which would mean the end of the gravy train. He decides that his mistress needs to die. Then he ends up killing the wrong woman by accident, and his troubles begin. We're in something of a golden age of the sociopathic antihero, on the page and on screen, from Jeff Lindsay's Dexter to the passionate borderlines of Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins. Something about the Zeitgeist makes us root for the people who can get away with things we wouldn't try. It usually helps if our antihero comes up against some formidable adversaries, and Arango has made sure things never get too easy for Henry. The police investigating the murder include a homicide detective who's "a certified investigative genius" with "a solved crimes rate of 100 percent." The detective has concluded his unknown suspect is a man "who's been living a double life for a long time." Another detective has already guessed Henry is the culprit. But Henry will not be ensnared so easily. He can't write a word of fiction, but he's adept at creating alibis, an apt scholar of forensics and police investigative techniques, and he's always a step or two ahead - of the police and of the reader. Arango, a German television writer, has constructed a clever plot that always surprises, told with dark humor and dry wit and bustling with aperçus that show no signs of jet lag from Imogen Taylor's clean translation. ("Every lie must contain a certain amount of truth if it's to be convincing," Henry reflects, "like the olive in the martini.") It's a story constructed out of and upon lies. Henry has his own sub-Nabokovian nemesis, a failed writer named Gisbert Fasch who's known Henry since their days in an orphanage, where Henry was a brutal bully. Fasch is everything Henry is not. He writes reams that no one wants to publish; he desperately wants some portion of Henry's success, the recognition and acclaim. He's been stalking Henry for years, trying to figure out how the enemy of his childhood became this international literary figure. He wants to unmask Henry. But what he's found is - nothing, only a gap of 25 years between the orphanage and the publication of the first "Henry Hayden" novel. We learn that Henry's father was an abusive lout, but otherwise we know very little about Henry's past: It was, we're told, a "minefield" of forgotten lies. The truth is doled out sparingly. Confronted by one of his police pursuers, Henry tells him, "There's no truth in me." "THE TRUTH AND OTHER LIES" will inevitably be compared with Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels. This isn't quite fair to Highsmith. Tom Ripley, like Henry Hayden, is a sociopath, but with a difference: He wants something. (In "The Talented Mr. Ripley," he's a creature of ambition and anxiety; he craves the wealthy wastrel Dickie Greenleaf's life.) Humbert Humbert was a man obsessed. Henry Hayden is none of these. He is barely self-aware, a sort of opportunistic infection. That goes even for his literary career. As Donald Westlake's "The Hook" and Nancy Price's "Night Woman" suggest, novelists have enjoyed writing about novelists who don't write their own novels. (Let's leave that one to the shrinks.) But Henry's career was not planned so much as stumbled upon. We don't cheer for him the way we do for Tom Ripley, because Henry can barely decide what he wants. What keeps us turning the pages is the cunning plot, but in the end, "The Truth and Other Lies" feels hollow at the center, like its protagonist. The only thing anyone in the novel cares passionately about is the unfinished manuscript, left by Henry's wife with a note, "Can you guess how it ends?" This is ultimately a crime novel about crime novels, a book about itself, and the reader finishes it complicit with the conceit, having kept reading to the end only to find out what happens next. JOSEPH FINDER'S latest novel is "The Fixer." On the page and on screen, we're in something of a golden age of the sociopathic antihero.