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"One of the darkest and most surrealistically hard-boiled things I’ve ever read. The detective is at least as scary as the murderers he’s chasing."
—William Gibson
The second book in Derek Raymond’s acclaimed Factory Series opens with the chilling discovery of a horribly butchered body abandoned in a warehouse by the Thames. It’s obviously the work of a contract killer, but why would a professional leave the body for discovery?
With his usual mix of cunning and nerve, the unnamed Detective Sergeant from the Unexplained Deaths Department stands up to both mobsters and his superiors to get to the truth. He soon finds himself engaged in a harrowing game of cat-and-mouse with a psychopathic murderer who seems to have ties to the highest levels of the British government.
When one of his superiors warns him to back off, saying, “You’ll always get the shitty end of the stick,” he explains, “Maybe, but I think that’s the end where the truth is.”
DEREK RAYMOND was the pseudonym adopted by Robin Cook, a well-born Englishman who spent a great portion of his life in France. Turning his back on Eton and all his birth class implied, he worked for years at whatever menial jobs or scams came to him, writing all the while, learning the secret life of London the way a cab driver must learn its streets. Soon enough he took the crime novel to heart, taking as his subject the dispossessed and faceless, society's rejects: alcoholics, abused women, prostitutes, petty criminals swarming like pilot fish in the wake of sharks. His life's work culminated in the four Factory novels now seen as clear landmarks in British fiction: He Died with His Eyes Open, The Devil's Home on Leave, How the Dead Live, and I Was Dora Suarez.
