Back from the Dead. This item is unavailable.Back from the Dead

Youselli is a cynical, disillusioned city cop painfully aware of the downward spiral he's on. McMahon is a fading but still profligate rock star who has begun receiving letters signed in the name of a girl who died fifteen years ago, when he was at the height of his fame. McMahon is desperate to know who's writing them. Youselli is reluctant - the privileged decadence and celebrity games of McMahon's life both irritate and attract him - but he agrees to investigate.
Almost immediately Youselli is pulled into the eerie mystery of the letters - their combination of anger and yearning, their fierce sexuality, their seeming authenticity in the face of their obvious fabrication and, especially, their strange fatalism.
And though the letters are addressed to McMahon, Youselli begins to feel more and more implicated by them himself. He senses that they are somehow tainting the lives of those who read them - especially Edith Weber, the psychiatrist he has enlisted to help him understand the mind behind the letters (and who might help him understand his mind as well) - but he grows increasingly blind to the effect they are having on his own life. Finally, he too appears to be malfated: following the deadly inner logic of obsession, he becomes both detective and fate's agent, the "solution" to the puzzle of the letters leading him toward his undoing.

Chris Petit gleaned considerable acclaim for The Psalm Killer, a complex, hard-edged thriller reminiscent of both Thomas Harris and Martin Cruz Smith, but absolutely individual in its achievement. And with Back from the Dead, Petit has created a haunting and atmospheric novel that's as unique as it is disturbing.

McMahon, a rock star uncomfortably conscious of being past his best, is shocked to open a letter that contains the same declarations of love as those of an obsessed fan who wrote to him years ago. But Leah, the author of those letters, is dead--so how can these new letters contain things that only the dead girl could have known? As the employment of ex-coppers for celebrity security has become a necessary fashion accessory, McMahon's wife hires Youselli, a hard-nosed city officer in need of extra money. But soon Youselli is inexorably drawn into the decadent lifestyle of his substance-abusing employers, and as he digs deeper into the strange motives of the mysterious fan, he plunges into a dark world of sexual obsession and manic love.

From the insecure musician McMahon to the down-on-his-luck Youselli, the psychology of Petit's characters are handled with a master's touch: "McMahon was making the best of appearing elegantly wasted, swigging a bottle of Jack Daniels from the neck, his eyes bulging and glittery with near obscene excitement, and looking several galaxies away. Youselli had to hand it him, he knew how to put on a party". --Barry Forshaw