The fifth of the "Factory" series of bleak, atmospheric and subversive crime novels. An alcoholic ex-colleague of the nameless detective is suspicious of a lodger at his Chalk Farm bedsit. In 18 months six well-heeled middle-aged women have regularly visited the lodger, and then disappeared.
Praise for Derek Raymond's Factory Series "Unrelenting existentialist noir--as if the most brutal of crime fictions had been recast by Sartre, Camus, or Ionesco while retaining something of the intimate wise-guy tone of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett."
--Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books "It's 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, bestselling author of Neuromancer "No one claiming interest in literature truly written from the edge of human experience, no one wondering at the limits of the crime novel and of literature itself, can overlook these extraordinary books."
--James Sallis, author of Drive "The Factory novels are certainly the most viscerally imagined of their kind that I've ever read, or reread multiple times. Derek Raymond wrote in a supposedly escapist genre in a manner that precluded any hope of escape."
--Scott Phillips, bestselling author of The Ice Harvest "There remains no finer writing - crime or otherwise - about the state of Britain."
--David Peace, author of "The Red Riding Quartet." "Carve Derek Raymond's name into the literary pantheon. He is one of the rare authors who seek to understand evil, ferret out the darkness in human nature, and blast Noir fiction out of the genre ghetto and into Literature. His nameless detective's quest through the bleak streets gets under your skin. Amazing, painful and brilliant."
--Cara Black, bestselling author of Murder at the Lanterne Rouge "I Was Dora Suarez blew me away - beyond hard boiled."
--Patton Oswalt "More Chandleresque than Chandler... [Raymond] could write beautifully...and, more importantly, what he is writing about in this novel are nothing less than the important subjects any writer can deal with: mortality and death."
--Will Self
"Pungently evokes the British underworld. As forceful as ever."
--Publishers Weekly "A bizarre mixture of Chandleresque elegance. . . and naked brutality"
--Dally Telegraph "Hellishly bleak and moving"
--New Statesman "Raw-edged, strong and disturbing stuff"
--The Scotsman
"For fans of Raymond's dark and compelling mystery fiction, this one is a must-read."
--Booklist
