Throw Me to the Wolves

After a young woman is found strangled by the River Thames, Michael Wolphram, who was an English and music teacher at an elite boarding school until his retirement, is hauled into the police station: he is the dead woman's neighbor and her DNA has been found in his car. Even before the police charge him, a bloodthirsty tabloid journalist uses Wolphram's eccentricities to hang him in the court of public opinion.

Throw Me to the Wolves is primarily narrated by Prof, a middle-aged detective who realizes that he knew Wolphram almost 30 years earlier. (Author Patrick McGuinness shrewdly waits a bit to reveal the particulars of their introduction.) Prof wonders how long he can withhold this information, which could compromise the investigation, and how long it will be before Wolphram recognizes him.

Dispersed throughout the novel are scenes from the perspective of a boy who was Wolphram's student. The man's impassioned teaching style spoke to the lad, and to several other young outcasts at the school, which made a habit of punishing the unmoneyed and the unconnected.

McGuinness, a poet and the author of a previous novel, The Last Hundred Days, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, takes a double-barreled approach to his first police procedural: it's also a canny evisceration of the media's noxious salaciousness. As Prof puts it, "You take sexual shame and sexual frustration, you top it up with wealth, hierarchy, and mental and physical violence, then serve it in a large glass called entitlement, and you get... well: you get what we have." And you get this fine novel. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

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