The gleeful eroticism of an early scene, when the narrator (and reader/audience stand-in) looks through a hole in a wooden wall and sees the back of a woman is simply delicious. He can, he says, count the soft, fine hairs on the back of her neck. The whole feeling is heightened by the feverish nature of the novel, driven partly by the more than slightly unstable trust fund man-child who drags the narrator into the mystery.

The ‘mystery’ moves so quickly, that there is no time, really, to puzzle it out. We depend on the deductions of our friend’s fevered mind and his musings on the sexual perversions of women that drive them to kill (we really do get a front row seat to his obsessions).

You may have noticed that I put the word mystery in inverted commas earlier. That’s because it is not a mystery, but a very freaky psychosexual drama wherein a man is willingly conned out of all of his money in order to participate in his thanotic/erotic desires.

Very, very weird.