Cold Eye - Hardcover

This is Giles Blunt's first novel. Since it appeared, he has worked for Business Week magazine and as a television screenwriter before going on to write nine more novels. These include the political thriller Breaking Lorca, the coming-of-age/"road" story No Such Creature, as well as the six John Cardinal novels, which have been made into an immensely successful limited series for TV. He and his wife live in Toronto.

A grotesque stranger helps a down-and-out Manhattan artist win fame and fortune in this vivid, harrowing interpretation of the Faust legend. Nicholas Hood likes to paint imaginary murder scenes. His paintings fail to inspire, a browsing detective tells him, because Hood has obviously never witnessed a real murder. Enter Andre Bellisle, an exquisitely accoutred, pockmarked dwarf who helpfully directs Hood to places where deaths occur. As Bellisle predicts, Hood's paintings of these deaths take New York by storm. Of course there's a price to be paid for Bellisle's information--but not the traditional one. To learn what that is, the reader is swept along on a superbly rendered descent into modern-day hell. Blunt is a TV writer whose literary debut is sensational. Paperback rights to Avon.
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