In the Cut (Vintage Contemporaries) [Paperback]

Susanna Moore (Author)

Book Description

Series: Vintage Contemporaries | Publication Date: August 14, 2007

Frannie Thorstin is a divorced English professor, living in a two room New York apartment. She spends much of her time alone, working on a book about dialects and idiomatic language. One evening at a bar, Frannie stumbles upon a man and a woman engaged in a sexual act. A week later a detective shows up at her door. The woman’s body has been discovered in the park across the street. What follows is a chilling tale of lust and murder as Frannie finds herself drawn to the detective. In the Cut is a masterpiece of literary suspense and sexual exploration.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Several stunning shocks await Moore's longtime readers in her fourth novel. First, there is the change of genre and locale. Her previous books (My Old Sweetheart; The Whiteness of Bones) have been lush, sensitive explorations of coming of age in a dysfunctional family in Hawaii, in an atmosphere permeated by island spirits and traditions. Here, Moore has honed her prose with knife-like precision to construct an edgy, intense, erotic thriller set in bohemian Manhattan. Her protagonist and narrator, Franny, is a divorced NYU professor deliberately closed off from emotional entanglements. She teaches a class for ghetto youth, meanwhile pursuing her obsession with language; she is writing a book recording the street vernacular and the black lingo of New York's seedier neighborhoods. Though on the surface her life seems circumscribed, she is a woman who takes risks, especially sexual risks. One night, she observes a man with a tattoo on his wrist in an act of sexual congress; though she does not see his face, she remembers the red-haired woman who had performed fellatio when she becomes a murder victim. Questioned as a possible witness by homicide detectives James Mallory and his partner Richard Rodriguez, she enjoys the frisson of danger when she takes Mallory as a lover, in spite of the fact that his wrist bears the same tattoo as that of the probable killer. The predatory, slightly corrupt Mallory is a coolly skillful lover, forcing Franny to push beyond sexual barriers into areas she has never explored. But in testing those erotic boundaries, she puts herself in mortal danger. Moore's control of her material is impressive: as she sweeps toward a knockout ending, she employs the gritty vernacular, red-herring clues and cold-blooded brutality of a bona-fide thriller without sacrificing the integrity of her narrative. The question is: will readers be disturbed?and perhaps repelled by?explicit descriptions of sexual acts, scatological language and gruesome violence? 100,000 first printing.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Billed as an "erotic thriller," Moore's (Sleeping Beauties, LJ 9/1/93) latest is erotic, but it's certainly no thriller. The heroine is an English teacher who muses endlessly on the meanings of language, even at times when she should be experiencing intense emotion. She witnesses an event that leads to a grisly murder and becomes sexually involved with the cop investigating the case. Her closest friend, with whom she discusses sexual experiences in detail, is viciously murdered and mutilated by the same killer, and she herself falls victim, an interesting trick in a story told in the first person. Not only is the heroine distanced by language from her emotions, but so is the reader. Not recommended, although Moore has a following and larger collections may want to have a copy.?Marylaine Block, St. Ambrose Univ. Lib., Davenport, Ia.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (August 14, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307387194
• ISBN-13: 978-0307387196
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.6 x 7.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (102 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #619,709 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Erotic Thriller - Not For The Faint Of Heart!, April 3, 2004

By 

Jana L. Perskie "ceruleana" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: In the Cut (Paperback)

Susanna Moore's tight, crisp, descriptive prose lends a special flavor to this darkly erotic thriller of a woman who lives life on the edge. Moore's novel is literary eroticism at it best and not just a mystery thriller about a vicious serial killer. Her manner of telling the tale is what makes it so unique.

Frannie, the novel's narrator, is an attractive 35 year-old divorcee who lives in a two room apartment on Washington Square. She teaches creative writing at NYU to a group of inner-city "low achievement teens" with high intelligence. She is also a connoisseur and scholar of language and is writing a book on street slang and its derivatives. Frannie takes chances. She is a sexual risk taker. However, she lives in her own private world where she spends an incredible amount of time pondering the nature of language, which leaves her vulnerable to her surroundings...and reality. Frannie is not at all street savvy. And her near-sightedness allows her to disengage even more from the potentially dangerous world in which she lives. One late afternoon in a neighborhood bar she makes a trip to the ladies room and inadvertently walks-in on a couple engaged in an intimate act. The man's face is obscured by shadow but she does notice that he has a unique tattoo on the inside of his wrist, (she has her glasses on). A few days later a NYC homicide detective, James E. Malloy, seeks Frannie out for an interview. There has been a brutal murder in the neighborhood. The victim is the woman Frannie saw performing the sex act in the bar. The evening Frannie saw her was her last.

Malloy takes risks also. He totally defies all rules about relationships between a detective and potential witness and acts on the tremendous sexual attraction between Frannie and himself. Malloy epitomizes the "tough guy with a badge," his frank blunt language adding to Frannie's turn-on...

Ms. Moore increases the suspense when Frannie is violently attacked on a dark street late at night. Then another murder is committed and the tension becomes almost too palpable. The climax is shocking. Warning - don't read the end of the book first. This is not a novel for the faint of heart. If you are a reader who is repelled by expicit sex or vividly portrayed violence, this is not for you. On the other hand, if you appreciate a well crafted, beautifully written erotic thriller, this one is excellent and original!

JANA

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars steely and bleak, August 19, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: In the Cut (Hardcover)

Susanna Moore's "In The Cut" is a thriller but an oddly detached one. Perhaps that's because her protagonist, a divorced writing teacher living in New York, seems detached from her own feelings and her own past; she observes both in fragments as the story progresses, and we get to know her only through refracted moments of recollection. It's a clever device, to sprinkle biographical data throughout the narrative instead of loading it up front, but in the end, we don't quite get to know her. Her true passion is words. She's a writing teacher, but her calling is linguistics. What I liked about this book was that Moore created a character who had interests other than those simply created to move the plot along. Her character spends a lot of time in her head, appreciating the music of language, the creation of new word usages and the evolution of slang; it would be easy to dispense with her as someone who lives too much in abstractions to appreciate the carnivorous world she lives in, but Moore doesn't pigeonhole her quite so neatly. The appeal of the ambiguous, sometimes threatening quality of words is mirrored by a similar appreciation of the menacing possibilities of human contact. This, of course, leads her protagonist into nothing but icy, gruesome trouble. The other characters in the book are all needy, some of them venal, and none of them entirely reliable. Our protagonist passively allows an affair with a troubled detective to begin, a man whose temperament is only a shade more empathetic than Harvey Keitel's "Bad Lieutenant". However, as a dramatic foil he's just as opaque as she is, and the portrait left of him seems incomplete. But that's the way the whole book feels once you've finished it--as if there was more to be explained. Moore seems to be aspiring to the place Joyce Carol Oates occupies when it comes to conveying modern urban terror and personal disintigration; that's a pretty high standard, and she doesn't make it, but there is still some clever writing here. Most convincing are her observations of the nonverbal cues men and women give each other, and the way some people communicate when more is imputed than is ever said.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Edgy, Taut, Tense, September 22, 2003

By 

LoriDee (New York USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: In the Cut (Paperback)

Susanna Moore's book is an edgy, taut, fast paced thriller. The story begins with Franny an NYU professor working with students from the projects in a writing class. This is a convenient relationship for her as she is able to work on her own book and fufill her obsessions with language forms, particularly slang usage in this area of NYC. Some professors comment on her inappropriately close relationship with her students as she often sees them outside of class to discuss their projects as well as her interests. On one particular night she goes to a bar with a student where she witnesses a man and a woman engaged in a sex act and this sets the plot for the book. This book includes alot of graphic sex scenes that Franny witnesses, recalls and engages in. She is not a particularly likable character and becomes less so as the plot moves along and she becomes involved in an investigation involving the murder of the girl she saw in the bar. The primary detective on the case, Malloy, is an interesting character who Franny senses is dangerous as well as exciting. As their relationship heats up, she begins to feel that she is being drawn into a dangerous, erotic game but doesn't want to stop herself . The last chapters of the book are page turners that I was unable to put down with an ending that doesn't disappoint. This book isn't for everyone though, it is graphic in both its sexual content and violent descriptions of the crime scenes. It is an exciting novel that will leave you thinking about it and its characters well after the book is closed.