title: An Absolute Gentleman: A Novel
author:  R. M. Kinder 
description: You may never look quite the same way at that punctilious little man down the street after reading this chilling first novel from Kinder, author of two well-received short story collections (<I>A Near-Perfect Gift</I> and <I>Sweet Angel Band</I>). Inspired by her own brush with a serial killer&mdash;back in the late '80s her neighbor Robert Weeks was sentenced to life in prison for two murders and suspected of more&mdash;Kinder deftly limns the deadly odyssey of Arthur Blume, a middle-aged creative writing professor who manages to be both the most ordinary and the most monstrous of creatures. The well-paced action cuts between Blume's Missouri present and horrific past in Georgia as the child of a psychotic teenage mother (which forms his view of treachery as the natural order and women as innately deceptive). Along the way, his slyly dropped clues&mdash;or are they red herrings?&mdash;add to the intrigue. Though one wishes that Kinder had gone lighter on some of the Southern-fried Freud, this artfully told tale of psychological suspense is as gripping as the spider webs Blume is so fond of studying. <I>(Oct.)</I> <BR>Copyright &copy; Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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  > HOLLY NEWMAN
  
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  All rights reserved.
  
  No part of this publication may be sold, copied, distributed, reproduced or
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  without the prior written permission of both the publisher, Oliver Heber Books
  and the author, Holly Newman, except in the case of brief quotations embodied
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  PUBLISHER'S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
  incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used
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  Copyright ©2021 by Holly Thompson
  
  Published by Oliver-Heber Books
  
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