An Absolute Gentleman (2007)

Arthur Blume, the ''gentleman'' narrator of the blade-sharp debut, An Absolute Gentleman, is an urbane, 50ish English prof with a taste for Victorian furniture and nature essays. Yet unbeknownst to faculty and students at his ''backwater'' Missouri university, his CV omits a trail of female corpses. As Blume befriends a 70ish aspiring poet and beds a pill-popping female colleague, Kinder — who based Blume on a real-life serial killer — veers into some overfamiliar Southern gothic terrain. At its best, though, R.M. Kinder's prose adroitly plumbs the inner life of an intellectual sociopath who brings equal precision to writing and killing. B+