A wickedly funny literary slasher set around Paris’s Shakespeare and Co,. in which prominent writers are the victims of a string of assassinations by a mysterious terrorist group. Cameos from Andrew Wylie, Roland Barthes and a merciless who’s who of contemporary literary culture. Gore Vidal’s adage, every time a friend succeeds, I die a little, has surely found its Freudian conclusion: it’s not the envious party that dies, it’s everyone else.