Amber Knight is London's hottest ticket - pop star, film star, front-page, gossip.
Nick Belsey is less celebrated. He can't shake his habit of getting into serious trouble. His career at Hampstead CID is coming to a dishonourable end. He is currently of no fixed address.
But a knock on the door is about to lead Belsey straight into the hollow heart of Amber's glittering life - a world populated by the glamorous and the lonely, the desperate and the obsessed. A deadly combination.
The House of Fame is a blistering joyride into the murderous underside of celebrity. The latest book in the hugely admired Belsey series, it sees one of the most cunning and audacious characters in contemporary fiction throw himself headlong into his most inextricable mystery yet, and come face to face with a ghost from his own notorious past.
Detective Nick Belsey needs help.
Something happened last night - something with the boss's wife - and Belsey needs to get out of London, and away from the debt and the drink and the deceit.
Collecting his belongings back at Hampstead CID on what should be the last day of his career, Belsey sees a missing person's report. But this one's different; this is on The Bishop's Avenue, one of the most expensive streets in the city. Belsey sees a chance for a new life.
But someone else got there first.
London is steaming under a summer of filthy heat and sudden storms - and Detective Nick Belsey, of Hampstead CID, is trying to stay out of trouble.
But then somebody sets him a riddle. How does a man walk into a dead-end alley and never come out? How does he disappear?
And then reappear - to snatch a girl, to dump a body beneath a London skyscraper, to send Belsey a package of human hair.
The answer lies underground, where the secrets degenerating beneath the city's sickly glitter are about to see the light of day.
William Burroughs closed his classic novel, Junky, by saying he had determined to search out a drug he called ‘Yage’, a drug that could be ‘the final fix’. In The Yage Letters, a mix of travel writing, satire, psychedelia and epistolary novel, he journeys through South America, writing to his friend Allen Ginsberg about his experiments with the strange drug, using it to travel through time and space and derange his senses. Burroughs’ letters reveal his desire to escape the norms of American society which hemmed him in, and the extraordinary steps he took to break free.
