An Absolute Gentleman

A spine–chilling first novel loosely based on the author's real–life relationship with a convicted murderer, An Absolute Gentleman delves, with subtlety and tremendous psychological insight, into a serial killer's mind.

Meet Arthur Bloom: charming guy, small–town English professor, struggling writer, and occasional murderer. In this beautifully articulated debut novel, R. M. Kinder brilliantly channels Arthur's voice to reveal the aberrant thought processes of a surprisingly sympathetic serial killer. Horror arises as it does in real life, in brief hints and disclosures that gradually reveal the complex nature of an all–too–human narrator.R. M. Kinder is the author of three prizewinning collections of short fiction, including A Near-Perfect Gift, winner of the University of Michigan Press Literary Fiction Award, and Sweet Angel Band, winner of Helicon Nine Editions’s Willa Cather Fiction Prize. She has also published two novels, An Absolute Gentleman and The Universe Playing Strings. Her prose has appeared in Passages North, Other Voices, North American Review, The New York Times, and elsewhere.