Cross Dressed to Kill

A TORRID TALE of love, loss, blackmail, revenge, and serial MURDER... Gripping - Funny - Thrilling - Compelling.. SET SNUGLY in middle England, in a small town just like yours, where nothing nasty should ever happen, 'Cross-dressed to kill' is a darkly comedic thriller, telling a torrid tale of love, loss, revenge, and murder. Lying somewhere between Niall Johnsons and Richard Russos 'Keeping Mum' and CBS televisions 'Dexter' (a serial killer hero - should you love him or hate him?). Cross-dressed to kill picks up the story of a likeable rogue, a gently camp hairdresser, who, disappointed with life and disillusioned with his once glittering career, after he begins chatting neurotically to his antithetical reflection in a salon mirror, starts culling his most irritating elderly clients. Cross-dressed to kill follows its 'hero' through the course of one turbulent year, charting half a dozen unfortunate deaths, a gender-ambiguous love interest, an arrest and conviction, a thrilling escape, and ultimately devastating revenge....... andrewlucas.co.uk/. ---- 'Easy reading at its very best, a captivating writing style'. Petra Kitto - CGD July 2011. ----'Fab holiday reading, had me laughing on the sand and on the edge of my bed last thing before sundown'. ---- 'In 'Cross dressed to kill' Andrew Lucas presents us with a baddy indeed, but a nicer, more appealing villain, a serial killer to love, a Sweeney Todd for the 21st century' . Max Southwell - Read/Write, May 2011. ---- 'CROSS DRESSED TO KILL is what Graham Greene used to call 'an entertainment'. It is not quite a traditional literary novel, although the style of writing is literary, and it makes no pretentions to changing the face of the cultural history of our century. It sets out to amuse, surprise, and entertain, and in this it succeeds. It is pleasingly amoral. The novel is driven conventionally by plot, character, and situation, but also by a very sure hand with dialogue, inner thought, and both mental and physical landscape, which effectively advances the narrative. While it is a well paced, escapist, witty read and can be enjoyed on that level alone, there is more than a whisper, a resonance, of social comment, which - without wishing to sound too pretentious - I think gives the manuscript bite. I read this on a fine cold afternoon in my conservatory in Oxfordshire with a glass of Chardonnay at my elbow, and it the novel was well suited to that function. Andrew Lucas successfully creates in the reader the suspension of disbelief, which has been the task of the novelist since the first storyteller unrolled his mat in the market square, and gives him or her a few hours of escapist pleasure. The reader is inextricably involved in the happenings. I am sure that I will not be the only person to appreciate this well structured, blackly comedic thriller. In particular, it has an original plot, which, these days, is not all that frequently encountered. I don't think there has been murderous hairdresser since the demise of Sweeney Todd.' Bryn Blackthorn PP and E.