Five Roundabouts to Heaven — John Bingham

FROM THE INTRODUCTION BY JOHN LE CARRÉ

"This novel comprises some of the best work of an extremely gifted and perhaps under-regarded British crime novelist....What gave John Bingham his magic was something we look for in every writer, too often in vain: an absolute command of the internal landscape of his characters, acutely observed by a humane but wonderfully corrosive eye."

Nineteen years is a long time. But when Peter Harding and Philip Bartels meet up again in the French countryside of their youth, the history and the dark secrets it holds are still there, tempered only slightly by time.

The two men share more than a past friendship. Decades earlier, trapped in a disenchanted marriage with his wife, Beatrice, Philip meets and falls in love with the graceful, charming Lorna Dickson. Overcome by the prospect of a humiliating divorce, Philip makes the decision to poison Beatrice. But when he invites his best friend, Peter, to meet his mistress at lunch one day, he unwittingly sets off a shocking chain of events that will forever change the lives of everyone involved.

Now available for the first time in over twenty years, Five Roundabouts to Heaven is one of master writer and storyteller John Bingham's greatest works. With a chilling, expertly calibrated plot and mesmerizing prose, it is the powerful study of how murder can so easily enter the minds of ordinary people.