The spellbinding new book by the winner of the 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award is a gripping, literary psychological thriller about a young woman and a peculiar taste for flesh.

Sabina Murray leapt to the attention of the literary world when she won the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award for The Caprices. For that collection of stories about the Pacific campaign of World War II, she was praised by the Washington Post for her "unflinching and majestic" prose. In her first novel since she was a college undergraduate and published Slow Burn, Sabina Murray has delivered a tour de force of intelligent suspense that seduces us with dark delight in her taboo subject.

When we meet Katherine, the winning — and rather disturbing — twenty-three-year-old narrator of A Carnivore's Inquiry, she has just left Italy and arrived in New York City, but what has propelled her there is a mystery. She soon strikes up an affair with a middle-aged Russian émigré novelist she meets on the subway, and almost immediately moves into his apartment. Katherine's occasional allusions to a frighteningly eccentric mother and tyrannical father suggest a somberness at the center of her otherwise flippant and sardonic demeanor. Soon restless, she begins journeying from literary New York to rural Maine and Mexico City, trailed, everywhere she goes, by a string of murders. As the ritualistic killings begin to pile up, Katherine comforts and inspires herself by meditating on cannibalism in literature, art, and history, and examining subjects as diverse as the Donner Party, the fall of Dante's Count Ugolino, and the true story behind Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa. The story races toward a hair-raising conclusion, while Katherine, and the reader, close in on the reasons for both her and her mother's fascination with aberrant, violent behavior.

This is a novel of ideas, a shocking and enlightening modern Gothic, and a brilliantly subtle commentary on twenty-first-century consumerism and Western culture's obsession with new frontiers. Told in highly intelligent prose reminiscent of Patrick McGrath or Angela Carter, A Carnivore's Inquiry is a sly, unsettling exploration of the questionable appetites that lurk beneath the veneer of North American civilization.

"That 23-year-old Katherine Shea is an unreliable narrator is evident from the first pages of Murray's mesmerizing new novel (after the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning story collection, The Caprices). As she describes the way she picks up hapless author Boris Naryshkin on the Manhattan subway, coolly manipulates and moves in with him, drains him of money and sleeps with other men, Katherine's lack of conscience and absence of affect obviously go beyond neurotic and into psychotic territory. Yet she is intelligent and witty in her solipsistic explanation of her needs and behavior, even as she hints at the manifestations of her mother's insanity and reveals the margins of her own unstable personality. Her fascination with cannibalism, and her deep familiarity with its depiction in art (Goya, Gericault), literature (Dante, Poe, Melville), folklore (Hansel and Gretel, the Tale of Bisclaveret) and history (the Donner Party, the voyage of the Essex) is revealed in tandem with the events of a journey that takes her across the country from New York to Mexico, with crucial scenes played out in a cottage in Maine. Katherine's hegira becomes increasingly sinister, and Murray paces her psychological thriller with consummate control, keeping the reader enthralled through subtle suggestion and a scattering of grisly details. But the author has a darker purpose. More than the story of one deranged woman's obsession, the novel and its brilliant subtext hint at the ways American society devours the weak, while building a case for a blood hunger in human nature. The tension of the last chapter is followed by a grim suspicion; the reader will go back to the first pages to confirm the worst. Agent, Esmond Harmsworth. (July) Forecast: Readers will be hooked by Murray's classy treatment of her sexy-sinister subject matter; this could become a minor goth classic. The author will get a bit more exposure when her film screenplay, Beautiful Country, starring Nick Nolte and Tim Roth, is released in 2005." Publishers Weekly (Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"That we trail after this wolfish character as doggedly as her doomed lovers has to do with Murray's mesmerizing voice, which is lovely, literate and deeply unnerving on the subject of human hunger." Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review

"Another tedious road journey across America as a tiresome narrator searches for spiritual nourishment....Slack, thin, with alienating details and characters." Kirkus Reviews

"[A] seductive thriller....Not for the easily queasy, this is a dark meditation on the vagaries that dwell beneath civilization's veneer." Booklist

"The characters are weird, funny, and original; every sentence crackles, and the dialogue defines punchy....Murray is a big talent, and the only piece of her second novel that doesn't really work is the macabre, sensationalistic plot. (Grade: B-)" Entertainment Weekly

"Murray not only creates a magnetic, amoral and utterly memorable heroine, she invents a whole new genre: ironic gothic." The Washington Post

"For a book about murder, A Carnivore's Inquiry is strangely bloodless....Had the story been presented in all its gruesome violence, it might have been more compelling." Carol Anshaw, The Chicago Tribune

"Perhaps because Murray keeps the writing and the humor at such a high level, one can't help but continue reading to the unsettling ending even as Katherine becomes increasingly irritating." Ron Bernas, Detroit Free Press

"A Carnivore's Inquiry is full of questions for which it fails to provide satisfying answers. As an allegorical tale about human appetite, hunger and consumption, it is hardly original." Carmela Ciuraru, Los Angeles Times

"The main story...does not lend itself comfortably to [Murray's] gothic imagination and melodramatic turn of mind, leading to some absurdly contrived story lines and a predictable conclusion that the reader can see coming a mile off." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Murray offers a chilling and well-constructed novel, but even before readers spot the bloody path Katherine is heading down they'll find her bad company." Library Journal

"A cracklingly original, brilliantly conceived modern Gothic....The elegantly thrilling, surprisingly poignant implications resonate long after the final page." Kate Christensen, Elle

"Katherine is such a beguiling character that the book ends up getting in her way. There is an inexorable quality to the plot that renders A Carnivore's Inquiry vaguely unsatisfying." Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald

"Even though Inquiry glistens with intelligence and craft, it doesn't attain the more coveted air of novels that are both affecting and notable. It gives you the creeps, not the shivers it aims for." Carlo Wolff, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Though A Carnivore's Inquiry has any number of scary (not to mention stomach-churning) moments, the novel's real appeal lies in Katherine's erudite, mordant humor....[She] serves as a gorgeous, freaky metaphor for that clichéd American Dream of having it all." Joanna Smith Rakoff, Time Out New York

"With echoes of both Poe and Patrick McGrath pervading her work, Murray essays to craft a psychologically credible portrait of mental illness." Jenifer Berman, Bookforum

Told in highly intelligent prose reminiscent of Patrick McGrath or Angela Carter, this is a sly, unsettling exploration of the questionable appetites that lurk beneath the veneer of North American civilization.