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THE DEVIL’S HOME ON LEAVE

Factory Series Book 2

Part of Melville International Crime

”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

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. His life’s work culminated in the Factory novels, now seen as clear landmarks in British fiction.

Praise for Derek Raymond’s Factory Series
“[The Factory Series is ] majestically gloomy.” —Richard Price, New York Times Book Review

“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

“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

“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

“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, author of The Quantity Theory of Insanity

“Beyond hard boiled.” —Patton Oswalt

“I cannot think of another writer so obsessed with the skull beneath the skin.” —The Times

“Superb . . an English Chandler.” —Daily Mail

“The beautiful, ruthless simplicity of the Factory novels is that Raymond rewrites the basic ethos of the classic detective novel.” —Charles Daylor, The Nation

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