When workaday author John Barlow is asked to ghostwrite a novel about secretive tax havens, he assumes the job will be straightforward. Then he learns that his employers, Swedish conceptual artist duo
Goldin+Senneby, want him to investigate Headless Ltd, a shadowy company with possible links to French philosopher Georges Bataille, famed for his fixation with human sacrifice. Barlow travels to Nassau, the mecca of offshore finance, to uncover the plot. He is not alone. A beautiful, mysterious woman is also seeking the truth about Headless—and about Barlow. One day the ghostwriter is happily posting to his travel blog; the next he is implicated in the decapitation of a police officer, consumed by the dark world of covert capitalism and secret societies. Barlow's probing becomes desperate. The more he grasps at the threads of the labyrinthine plot, the closer he comes to madness.
“A mysterious and brilliant gesture of fictional investigation.”
Joseph O'Neill, author of
The Dog and Netherland, winner of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
“A remarkable, genre-bending work.
Headless reminds us that it is when we leave reality that we are most thoroughly ensconced by it.”
Bill Maurer, anthropologist and author of
Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law, and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands
“K. D. has created a masterwork of metaphysical detective fiction.
Headless is a coded, clandestine novel that nevertheless makes for breathless reading until the last page.”
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, artist
