A story worth killing for
Gloria Greene is the kind of woman the world loves to hate. You see, Gloria is the editor-in-chief of Portfolio magazine and thinks she can get what she wants, whenever she wants and at whatever the cost.
In short, she considers herself invincible.
As she remarks to Brian, a potentially useful leg-up to The Algonquin editorship, but with whom she settles for an initial leg-over: 'I never test Brian. I don't get diseases.' However, is her lust for power such that she was driven to murder her predecessor so that she could take over his position? The media have tagged the culprit the Bulk Mail butcher - a reference to the macabre way the dismembered parts of PJ were posted to different addresses around the US.
Quite possibly, you imagine, but then Gloria is a man-eater so chances are she is more likely to have consumed her prey.
The FBI certainly thinks she was responsible and she makes no attempt to deny it. After all, in Gloria's book, there is no such thing as bad publicity.
She definitely has the motive. Rising from a humble intern, there was the little problem of PJ standing in the way of her meteoric rise to the top of her profession.
And she could have had access to the tools of the trade courtesy of her father, who is a plastic surgeon.
Jonathon Keats, a senior editor at San Francisco Magazine, has assembled a devastating portrait of a megalomaniac and convincingly satirises blind ambition.
But this is no whodunnit in the true sense of the word. The reader only has to scan the novel's preface, which lists a useful rundown of history's greatest female murderers, to learn why.
There is Lucrezia Borgia, whose talent for dispensing toxins was legendary. Keats helpfully tells us that Borgia also had an incestuous relationship with her father - not dissimilar to that of Gloria with her father.
Take one scene in the book when she and her father return to his home to discover a naked girl lying on the couch. 'You got her for me?' Gloria asks her father. 'I got her for us,' he replies.
Of course, Catherine de Medici was another dab hand with poison, but more in keeping with the style of PJ's slaughter was Lizzie Borden, who supposedly chopped up her parents with an axe.
What made it brilliant in Borden's case was that in court she always appeared teary-eyed and shrouded - and she was acquitted of parricide.
As Gloria helpfully points out: 'Acting without good reason, or without sufficient planning, is as inexcusable as getting caught.' Keats moves the novel towards its conclusion with stealth. Along the way we are given a glimpse into the workings of a magazine, such as the clash of leading personalities and the choosing of the cover story and picture, albeit hammed up for the benefit of the reader.
And to accentuate the theme of dismemberment, Keats inserts a description detailing the dissection of different parts of the body at the start of each new section within the book.
It becomes a little tedious as Gloria battles to save her job from the adverse publicity and hits on a story that will boost circulation yet manage to keep herself in the limelight.
As a result, the reader becomes interested in only one thing: having been told the identity of the murderer, does she succeed in getting away with it? But, as with many a murder, things are never quite that cut and dried.
The Pathology of lies by Jonathan Keats Warner Books $140
