Psychopaths Anonymous

London advertising writer Maeve, the functioning alcoholic who narrates this unsettling noir from British author Carver (the Detective Sergeant Pace series), stalks Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, intoxicated by the vulnerability and human misery revealed there. Also addicted to sex, she engages in tawdry one-night stands with men from those meetings, some of whom she kills. As Maeve successively mocks each step of the AA program, she contorts it into her own demonic version, denying God and destroying human lives simply because she can and because “nobody cares.” The trouble for Maeve begins when she starts her own support group, Psychopaths Anonymous, and she targets Jill, a single mother struggling with alcoholism and driven to prostitution, and Seth Beauman, with whom she becomes obsessed. She eventually falls in love with Seth, but the police are closing in. Carver highlights the dark side of the current era, such as the negative consequences of ubiquitous online porn and society’s disregard for its outcasts, like the helpless losers Maeve preys upon. This powerful look into the abyss of a psychopathic personality won’t be to every taste. Agent: Blake Friedmann, Blake Friedmann Literary (U.K.). (May)