- Paperback: 232 pages
- Publisher: Vintage; New edition edition (4 Feb 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0099778718
- ISBN-13: 978-0099778714
- Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 12.8 x 1.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 392,329 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Jon Bennett is the perfect employee: efficient, completely loyal, conscientious to the last. But his job is murder--pure, cold and calculated. It is only when he meets an old friend that the life he has forged for himself amid the nameless, the faceless and the heartless is challenged and he is forced for the first time to face the consequences of his actions.
Cruel, powerful and decidedly unnerving, Mr In-Between is an uncomfortable portrait of a man who has so successfully erased his past that the stirring of love and friendship becomes an agony that is too much to endure.
We never really know why Jon Bennett turned out the way he did, and it actually doesn't matter. What matters is the knowledge that, from the minute that Andy and Cathy appear on the scene, there will be a descent into the kind of madness from which there is no return. At one point there is a false sense that some kind of status quo has been reached, but Cathy's death merely acts as a way to ensure that the descent continues until it becomes all the more obvious that there is only one way out.
As searingly painful as many of the physical wounds Jon Bennett inflicts on his countless victims on behalf of the bizarre, yet somehow captivating, Tattooed Man, Mr In-Between is a disturbing, powerful novel that will leave an indelible mark on the mind. --Susan Harrison
Product Description
Jon Bennet works for the Tattooed Man. He's an ideal employee: efficient, conscientious, and utterly loyal to the man for whom he kills. It is an existence that encourages solitariness, which Jon has cultivated, until he encounters Andy and Cathy, old friends from school, now married with a child.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Sort of like a UK version of the Sopranos but much darker in terms of its bleak vision and coal-black humour Mr Inbetween is a book that will stay with you long after you have finished it. Plot seethes with male violence, the nature of friendship and bone dry dialogue (its all about redemption, apparently).If you understood American Psycho or J G Ballards recent excellent efforts like Super-Cannes or Cocaine Nights then I would recommend this book to you- Enid Blyton it ain`t.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Neil Cross has managed to do with his first book what some authors never manage in their entire career. With 'Mr In-Between' Neil explores the depths of the human phsyche, bares the main character's innermost, evil thoughts, and yet still convinces the reader that Jon is a man, not only capable of being redeemed, but also worthy of that redemption.
The book captures the reader's interest at the very beginning and holds it well throughout the rest of this rather short book. Neil starts off using many uncommon words which can sometimes be distracting, but this fades at about the half-way mark and vanishes completely by the end of the book.
All in all, this is a very good book. It certainly reads as if it were written by a veteran novelist and not a first-timer.
Well done Mr Cross.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Neil Cross's first book, Mr In-Between is hellish, stark, violently bleak and enormously impressive. I feel as if my favourite thriller writer has been hiding his existentialist credentials - yet I always knew he was better than average, I just didn't expect that his debut novel would display such an assured taste for the darker reaches of the human psyche.
Nobody knows Jon - perhaps even Jon doesn't know Jon. What he does defines him, but only while he does it. After that he needs oblivion. Jon works for The Tattooed Man and he is a valuable employee. But then someone turns up from Jon's past, an old schoolfriend, Andy, the only one who stood up for him when he was bullied. Andy's married with a baby daughter, but they are living on the breadline so it only seems fair that Jon is able to give them a bit of a leg-up - a job for Andy, the money for a new kitchen.
Things seem to be going right, but Jon should have known better. The delicate relationships between Jon, the Tattooed Man and several other people are going to be disturbed. Jon took a wrong turning somewhere, allowing real people, real feelings to affect his reasoning, setting in motion something he cannot control. Along the way - the very violent and in some cases nauseating way - Jon finds that thinking for himself was only his first mistake.
Neil Cross is devilishly good. He never writes the same kind of thriller twice and his characterisations are clever and culturally astute. If you're new to Cross, after Mr In-Between, try Natural History - it's a very different book, but the shock three-quarters of the way through was one of the most extraordinary I've read. His books both fit the thriller genre, and often defy or even distort it, and always to brilliant effect.
Nobody knows Jon - perhaps even Jon doesn't know Jon. What he does defines him, but only while he does it. After that he needs oblivion. Jon works for The Tattooed Man and he is a valuable employee. But then someone turns up from Jon's past, an old schoolfriend, Andy, the only one who stood up for him when he was bullied. Andy's married with a baby daughter, but they are living on the breadline so it only seems fair that Jon is able to give them a bit of a leg-up - a job for Andy, the money for a new kitchen.
Things seem to be going right, but Jon should have known better. The delicate relationships between Jon, the Tattooed Man and several other people are going to be disturbed. Jon took a wrong turning somewhere, allowing real people, real feelings to affect his reasoning, setting in motion something he cannot control. Along the way - the very violent and in some cases nauseating way - Jon finds that thinking for himself was only his first mistake.
Neil Cross is devilishly good. He never writes the same kind of thriller twice and his characterisations are clever and culturally astute. If you're new to Cross, after Mr In-Between, try Natural History - it's a very different book, but the shock three-quarters of the way through was one of the most extraordinary I've read. His books both fit the thriller genre, and often defy or even distort it, and always to brilliant effect.
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