Customer Reviews

How to Be Bad: A Novel

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In Richmond on the Thames, twenty-something Mark Madden owns a bookstore that sells rare books. After the "Son of God" destroys a "dirty" book, he gets into an incident in the nearby park resulting in a wacko punching him in the forehead. The EMTs take him to the hospital where the cops react the same way as they did with the burned book insisting he is lucky to still breathe. At the hospital Caro Sewell sits down next to Mark; she was his girlfriend for six months when he was eighteen until she dumped him to blow a teacher.

Caro admits she owes him eighteen months as every two years she reinvents herself and drops her boyfriend. To his shame the mousy Mark still wants her and loves her. Caro teases him about his anal lists that he draws up on nonsensical subjects, but also offers him a test of his love for her. She draws up a list: 1) father; 2) Warren; and 3) Jesus. If he kills the trio she will give him the year and half he did not have with her that she owes him. Although he fears prison he is obsessed with Caro, will Mark go mad with or without her?

This is a wild thriller that stars a strange lead couple. Readers will keep on going in one sitting to learn whether Mad Mark Madden will choose love and death or the collective safe route. Fans will believe his choice and his follow-up as David Bowker leaves his audience pondering how bad someone can become if the price is right.

Harriet Klausner

This was a quick read. Quite a bit of tension and action, but not a lot of depth. The writing style seemed like it was translated from a screenplay. Definitely an original plot.

A great read! An exciting and unusual book that holds your interest from the very beginning to the last page.

I have mixed emotions about this book. I think that the idea for the plot was fairly original and the writing was brisk enough to make me want to keep reading despite the bizarre and dark content overtones.

The story is about a man (Mark) who reunites with his crazy ex girlfriend (Caro). Caro is supposedly very beautiful and it is this beauty that makes men do crazy things for her. Mark is a relatively normal guy who keeps finding himself mixed up in a web of violence due to his relationship with her. It turns out that when Mark and Caro first parted ways, he was devasted to the point where he did not know how to really be a man let alone how to be a "bad" man -- to put it mildly: Mark was a wimp. Over the course of the novel, Mark gets beat up, humiliated, married, chased by the law, and stalked by a psychotic lovestruck killer. It's a lot to handle for your average 23 year old. Caro asks Mark to kill people for her because they have wronged her in some way. He realizes that the idea is crazy but somehow the bodies end up dead. I won't spoil the story by telling you how. Suffice it to say that if you are into dark Brit Lit, this may be right up your alley. I would like to point out that the author works Nick Hornby's name into his story at least 20+ times and this is sort of like a much darker version of High Fidelity. I have no inclination to read anyting else by this author in the future and this book wasn't a total waste of my time, it just wasn't my style. Worth taking out of the library. Then ending may surprise you.

yeah it waz a pretty good book....kina crazy...u swhould buy it!!!

A very sick fellow is Rawhead but in his own way he has a conscience and follows a code of ethics. Unfortunately, this code does not preclude excessive loss of life for those around him and it is the unfortunate soul who ends up being a "friend". Once you are a friend of Rawhead's, your life (and the lives of those around you) will never be the same. Very funny, slightly two dimensional characters, but quite entertaining and, I suspect, captures the criminal mindset extremely well.