Review of Linwood Barclay's A Tap on the Window

A Tap on the Window by Linwood Barclay

Hear the words "Niagara Falls," and what comes to mind? A dizzying drop of thundering water and clouds of mist, sure. There's the famous vaudeville routine, during which the innocent mention of Niagara Falls triggers a maniac's memory of revenge and an attack that begins with his bellow, "Slowly I turned...step by step...inch by inch" (see Abbott and Costello's version here, and the Three Stooges, here). The 1953 movie Niagara, starring Marilyn Monroe and Joseph Cotten, inspired mobs of honeymooners to visit the Falls. Daredevils have gone over the Falls in barrels and teetered across high wires spanning the Niagara River gorge, although people swept over the Falls by accident or design face high odds against survival.

That's why a person "Mister" is threatening to throw into the Niagara River is panic-stricken in the conversation that opens Linwood Barclay's thriller, A Tap on the Window (New American Library/Penguin Group (USA), 2013). We don't know that person's fate before the scene shifts suddenly to the car containing our narrator, Cal Weaver, a middle-aged former cop who's now a private eye in Griffon, New York, a town of 8,000 about an hour from Buffalo. Of all people, Cal knows that picking up a teenage girl hitchhiking in the rain outside Patchett's Bar is a monumentally dumb thing to do. But he does it anyway, because when he opens the car window in response to her tap on the glass, she tells him she knew his son, Scott. Scott died when he fell off the roof of Ravelson Furniture two months earlier, and it has devastated Cal and his wife, Donna. Cal, determined to hear what Claire Sanders, the mayor's daughter, can tell him about Scott, lets her into his car.

Claire and Cal may as well have joined hands and jumped into the nearby Niagara River; this book's characters have about as much control over their fates as swimmers engulfed in the rapids near the Falls. Writer Barclay, a Canadian, often sets his thrillers on the American side of the border, and he isn't one to politely ignore American anxieties. Instead, he hoses his complex characters with them and turns their resulting behavior into a corkscrewing tale of suspense. We can even pity the victimizers, because they're also victims here. One story line—written in italics in short, separate chapters—involves what looks like an off-kilter private matter, before we understand how it meshes with the other story line Cal narrates about himself and small-town politics and life in Griffon.

The problems facing Griffon are familiar ones to Americans. While some Griffon citizens, including the mayor, believe the police go too far in their attempts to prevent crime (like spray painting a young graffiti artist's throat and knocking out a suspicious stranger's teeth), others believe a low crime rate justifies the means. Griffon deals with underage drinking by semi-tolerating it at Patchett's, because at least the bar's owner, Phyllis, is keeping a practiced eye on the teenagers there. Some parents can't be bothered to ride herd on their teenagers. They're too busy stealing from their employers, treating their employees shamefully, cheating on their spouses, worrying about what the neighbors will think, or simply watching TV. But well-meaning, concerned parents like the Weavers aren't perfect people either, and they aren't immune to problems and heartbreak. Griffon kids contribute their share to the wreckage of family happiness by abusing drugs and breaking the law, lying and keeping secrets, using their cellphones to send pictures of their privates, spending the night with a lover—you know, being screwed-up kids. In fact, messed-up relationships between parents and their kids are at the center of this thriller. Even the normal problems of communication between adults and teenagers spur the plot along.

This reminds me: we left Claire and Cal in the car. Cal gets nowhere in his conversation with Claire before she complains of an upset stomach and asks him to stop at Iggy's so she can use the restroom. When she doesn't return, Cal goes in to check on her, without success. He returns to the car and sees a young woman inside it. She resembles Claire, has the same hair, and is wearing the same clothes, but they haven't traveled far before Cal realizes she isn't Claire. He also realizes they are being followed. When he tells her he knows something screwy is going on, the not-Claire insists on getting out and disappears into the night. Unfortunately for Cal, he is now involved in the disappearances of two teenage girls, and neither his conscience nor the police (Cal has an adversarial relationship with his brother-in-law, the chief of police) will let him shrug it off. Before Cal is finished narrating this excellent thriller, we'll see lives play out and end—step by surprising step, inch by confounding inch—a stone's throw away from Niagara Falls.

Spreading Some Holiday Cheer

Take a break from the winter holiday planning. Abandon your shopping, cleaning, New Year's resolutions listing, gift wrapping, cards mailing, decorating, baking, madly running around, or smooching under the mistletoe. Swipe a cookie. Fetch a drink, and settle down with a terrific book, like one of those below:

According to Mike Bowditch of Paul Doiron's The Poacher's Son, his father Jack is a "saloon-brawling logger with a rap sheet of misdemeanors and the public persona of a Tasmanian devil." The 24-year-old Mike hasn't spent much time with Jack since his parents divorced when he was nine, and he moved to southern Maine, from its wild northern woods, with his mom. After glumly watching the pavement spreading beneath his feet and graduating from college, Mike became a Maine game warden, a cop whose beat is the forest. It's an all-consuming, poorly-paying job, but Mike loves it.

Now, Mike's girlfriend Sarah has given up on his ever attending law school and has moved out. He hasn't seen his father for several years. An angry meeting about a Canadian timber company's purchase of Maine forest land and what it means for the land's leaseholders ends with the ambush-style shootings of Jonathan Shipman, the company's spokesman, and Deputy Bill Brodeur, who was driving him. Immediate suspicion falls on Jack. When Jack escapes from police custody and disappears into the woods, Mike and his mother are the only people who think he's innocent. Mike risks his job, his friendships, and his relationship with Sarah to find and clear his father.

While we follow Mike's actions in the present, he reminisces about earlier times with Jack. The shifts in time and setting are very smoothly handled. Doiron's characterization, setting, pacing, and plotting are all first-rate. This book is a realistic portrayal of complicated relationships between a son and his father, men and women, and people and nature, as well as the suspenseful search for a double-murder suspect that reaches an explosive finish. By the end, I was holding onto my chair.

The Poacher's Son, published by Minotaur Books in 2010, was nominated for four major mystery fiction awards and received the 2011 Barry Award for Best First Novel. The author grew up in Maine and is currently the editor-in-chief of Down East and a Registered Maine Guide. During this last week, I've been unhappy about the shooting of wolves right outside Yellowstone National Park. Reading this achingly vivid book, written by a man who obviously loves the woods of Maine, its traditional way of life, and its wildlife––and who also recognizes the terrible toll of progress––somehow soothed my spirit. Shelve Doiron's Mike Bowditch books next to books by C. J. Box. I highly recommend this one, the first in the series.

A father-son relationship isn't the main focus of Canadian writer Linwood Barclay's 2012 stand-alone book, Trust Your Eyes, published by Penguin Group (USA). Instead, the center of interest is the relationship between two adult brothers: Ray is a 37-year-old illustrator who lives in Burlington, Vermont. He looks like the slender Vince Vaughn from the movie Swingers. His two-years-younger brother, Thomas, lives in Promise Falls, New York, and looks like the meatier Vince Vaughn from The Break-Up.

Thomas is a schizophrenic and maps savant. He has decorated the upstairs hallway of the family home, where he lives with his widowed father, with so many map pieces it looks "as if someone had put the world into a blender and turned it into wallpaper." Thomas spends 23 hours per day in his bedroom, and he uses almost every waking moment to memorize the world's cities, using the computer program Whirl360. According to Thomas, this is a job he does for the CIA. Thomas foresees a catastrophic global event that will cripple computers and thus create a world without maps. He'll be the only person who knows how to reproduce them. "And not just maps, but how each and every street in the world looks. Every storefront, every front yard, every intersection." Keeping track of Thomas's progress on this project and acting as his CIA liaison is former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who "talks" in Thomas's head.

Whirl360's street-view maps are made
by a car similar to this one

When Ray and Thomas's father dies in a lawn-tractor accident, Ray returns to Promise Falls to take care of his father's estate and to figure out Thomas's future. It helps Ray when he runs into Julie McGill, an old high-school acquaintance who now works as a reporter for the Promise Falls Standard. It becomes more difficult for him when Thomas's emails to the CIA cause the FBI to visit. Things get more complicated still when Thomas insists that Ray investigate something Thomas saw while "walking" through Whirl360's streets of Manhattan: an apartment window revealing what looks like a woman's head covered in plastic. Thomas believes he's witnessed a murder.

Trust Your Eyes alternates chapters, in which Ray narrates his travails with Thomas, with chapters detailing a political campaign that's running amok. These two story lines, which travel back and forth in time, require the reader's attention, but eventually they connect in a very satisfying way. The whole 498-page book is satisfying; a Russian nesting doll of layer-upon-layer deception and betrayal. There's a delicious contrast between obvious blunders that just get worse and seemingly inconsequential actions that lead, step by step, to disastrous consequences. It's great to see characters with mental illnesses featured as interesting good guys, rather than villains, in books such as Franck Thilliez's thriller, Syndrome E (reviewed here); Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn (reviewed here); George Dawes Green's The Caveman's Valentine (reviewed here), and this one.

Doiron's The Poacher's Son and Barclay's Trust Your Eyes are written by talented story tellers. They feature characters who grow and change. They provide a fascinating look at relationships, the nature of love, and the expectations people have for each other. These books are a good springboard for discussions about how we make decisions and the role that chance plays in our fate. On top of this, they're fine mystery fiction. They're sure-fire holiday cheer.

Book Review of John Verdon's Let the Devil Sleep

Let the Devil Sleep by John Verdon

Dave Gurney is an unhappy man. It's been six months since the retired NYPD homicide detective stopped three bullets, but he still has nagging physical symptoms. He has claustrophobic dreams and feels insecure without his gun. Luck, which Dave calls a fool's substitute for competence, saved his life. He finds this unsettling.

His wife, Madeleine, was annoyed when Dave was dragged out of retirement in Think of a Number and Shut Your Eyes Tight, the first two series books. In John Verdon's third book, Let the Devil Sleep, Madeleine is tired of Dave sitting and staring at the walls of their Catskills home. She doesn't object when journalist Connie Clarke, who made Dave famous by featuring him as the NYPD's Supercop, asks him to help her 23-year-old daughter Kim Corazon with a couple of things.

Kim began studying the impact of murder on a victim's family for a journalism thesis in grad school. RAM-TV is interested in making her interviews into a reality miniseries called The Orphans of Murder. The "orphans" are related to one serial killer's victims. In 2000, the Good Shepherd shot six people as they drove their black Mercedes sedans in upstate New York. The FBI joined the investigation when one victim was shot across the state line in Massachusetts.

The killer's public manifesto contains biblical references and remarks about culling greedy people. An FBI profiler had a field day, citing the Freudian meaning behind the big guns he used and the class warfare he advocated, but her psychological profile didn't help identify the killer. The killings stopped, but the case was never solved. The New York State Police, especially Senior Investigator Jack Hardwick and Max Clinter, who retired with PTSD after he accidentally let the Good Shepherd escape, still resent the bullying jerks of the FBI.

The Catskill Mountains in Upstate New York

Connie is thrilled that Kim has this opportunity to break into prime-time TV. She wants Dave, who had the NYPD's best homicide clearance rate in his 25 years there, to talk to Kim about murder and about her ex-boyfriend Robert Meese. He is apparently stalking her. Although Meese denies it, someone is breaking into Kim's apartment and doing creepy things like leaving a trail of blood drops. The local police aren't interested.

Dave agrees to spend one day accompanying Kim as she meets with a RAM-TV production executive and several Good Shepherd victims' adult children. Events make Dave wonder whether the FBI was too quick to settle on a narrative for the crimes and he begins to dig further. He calls Hardwick and Clinter and riles FBI agent Matthew Trout. The case has become enshrined in the annals of contemporary psychology and its truth is no longer open to question. Someone else doesn't like the renewed attention to the Good Shepherd's crimes. Someone thinks Kim and Dave should stop and let the devil sleep.

I'm guilty of a major thriller-reading sin

I had the devil of a time sleeping before finishing this book. Its cover should illustrate the word suspenseful in the dictionary. The unfolding revelations of the cold case, escalating threats against Dave and Kim, more crimes and Dave's maneuvering fed my anxiety until I couldn't stand it any longer. With 25 pages to go, I confess I did something I never do. I cheated by skimming quickly to the end. Then I went back and read every word. After I finished, I read Think of a Number (Dave investigates threatening letters sent to a former college classmate, and an impossible crime) and Shut Your Eyes Tight (Dave looks into the beheading of a bride on her wedding day). I recommend you read these outstanding books first, although Let the Devil Sleep can be read on its own with enjoyment.

The characters are all three-dimensional. Dave has an inner life without being neurotic. State cop Hardwick loves thumbing his nose at the FBI, and his interactions with Dave are fun to read. The RAM-TV exec is sleazy and the trashy TV network becomes a character deserving of Dave's scorn. How often does one find secondary female characters as well done as the men? It's good to see a competent female cop and a female FBI profiler who's respected and aggressive, even if Dave thinks Rebecca Holdenfield's analysis of the Good Shepherd is a bunch of bull. Kim's upbringing makes her interest in these interviews natural.

The characters' relationships are nuanced and realistic. The relationships Dave has with his family make him an unusual character in the crowded field of troubled cops. The Gurneys have a marriage in which glances are as meaningful as words. While their relationship is close, it's temporarily strained by Dave's unsatisfying retirement and current funk. Dave's son Kyle was raised mostly by his mother while Dave worked for the NYPD. Kyle arrives for a visit and it's a chance for Dave to realize how little attention he gave his son but how much it affected the man Kyle has become. As Dave reassures himself about his professional skills, he's also reminded of the support he both gives and receives from his family.

The setting is as well done as the characters. Author Verdon was a Manhattan ad executive before he retired and moved with his wife to upstate New York. It's obvious he's familiar with Syracuse and life in the Catskills. Its sights, sounds, smells and textures are used with good effect in the plot. The dark is a menacing place in the country.

The writing is clear and straightforward. It would make a good choice for an audiobook. Let the Devil Sleep will be published by Crown on July 24, 2012. Get going on the first two books in the Dave Gurney series, because you'll want to read this one too. Don't let the book's suspense get to you like it got to me. Fight off the temptation to skip ahead to the end. Take the time to enjoy your heart skidding as you read this clever thriller.

Note: I received a free review copy of Let the Devil Sleep.

April Is the Cruelest Month

Today is a good time to think about the meaning of human frailty, death, and redemption, whether one celebrates Easter as the resurrection of Jesus Christ or the glorious rebirth of the earth.

Below are some books of crime fiction set during Lent or the Holy Week culminating in Easter:

Ayacucho means "place of the dead." It is the capital city of Huamanga Province in Peru and is famous for its 33 churches and the large religious celebrations during Holy Week.

It is also the birthplace of Associate District Prosecutor Félix Chacaltana Saldívar. Chacaltana's March 8, 2000 report about a dead man opens Santiago Roncagliolo's literary thriller, Red April. The corpse, burnt to a crisp and missing an arm, has been discovered in an Ayacucho hayloft on Ash Wednesday. The body isn't recognizable, and possible witnesses were too inebriated from days of celebrating to notice anything.

Chalcaltana is a man who only recently returned to Ayacucho after spending most of his life in Lima. He's incapable of lying and consumed with duty to his profession and the memory of his mamacita. He's in charge of the investigation because the police don't want to touch it. They fear the press will get wind of it and scare away tourists, or the government in Lima will hear of it and scuttle their promotions. The local military man in the Ministry of Justice, Commander Carrión, wants Chalcaltana's reports personally. He brushes off Chalcaltana's questions about whether this death could mean a return of 1980s terrorist violence by Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path. "Get one thing into your head: in this country there is no terrorism, by orders from the top," Carrión says. Then he sends Chalcaltana on a hellish trip to observe elections in Yawarmayo.

Ayacucho, Peru

Chalcaltan's series of ludicrous investigative reports, written as ordered by Carrión to reflect the official line, are studded throughout Roncagliolo's tale rich in Peruvian history, symbolism, and folklore. They are accompanied by another type of report in small letters and full of misspellings, which appear to be written by a killer. The Ash Wednesday corpse is just the beginning of a religious season of murders and more; Chalcaltan and his colleagues are "fighting against ghosts, against the dead, against the spirit of the Andes." In Red April, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman and winner of the 2006 Alfaguara Prize, it's difficult to tell the difference between the terrorists and the counterrorists. There are plenty of murders and disappearances to go around for everyone.

Army helicopter pilot is an unusual occupation for a woman who becomes an Episcopalian priest, but Rev. Clare Ferguson is an unusual woman. She's relieved when money is located to repair the roof of St. Alban's, although she's concerned because it will affect funding for the town's free health clinic. The clinic was founded by the widow of Jonathon Ketchem, who disappeared during Prohibition. When the clinic's director, Dr. Allan Rouse, disappears, some suspect a disgruntled young woman, but Clare and Chief of Police Russ Van Alstyne disagree.

Out of the Deep I Cry is the third book in Julia Spencer-Fleming's traditional series set in Millers Kill, New York. The story is told with flashbacks to earlier decades, all against the backcloth of the present Lenten season at St. Alban's. When Clare and the married Chief Van Alstyne are stuck in the freezing church basement, their closeness is more than an opportunity to keep warm. The mystery is not the main reason to read this book; rather, it is the chance to spend time during the spring with Spencer-Fleming's vivid characters in this small town in the Adirondacks.

On a dark night early in the Easter Week of the Greek Orthodox Church, part of the body of the larger Eastern Orthodox Church, a saintly monk is cruelly murdered on the winding streets of Patmos, an island in Greece.


In Jeffrey Siger's Prey On Patmos, the crime was heinous not only because of the nature of the victim, but because it happened during a holy time and in a holy place. Patmos is in the eastern Aegean and it is here, in a cave almost 2000 years ago, that Saint John wrote the apocalyptic Book of Revelation. It has a small police force of its own, but in an unusual case like this one, which many would like to attribute to muggers, Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis of the Special Crimes Division is called to take over the investigation.

Mount Athos

In the Greek Orthodox Church, Easter is the most important day of the year. Easter week is the week preceding Easter day. Tourists flock to places such as Patmos and Mount Athos, another religious site that contains 20 monasteries that have been there 15 centuries.

Mount Athos is a self-governing monastic state that is vaguely a parallel to Rome. The monasteries all have one representative to a central Holy Community. And the leader of this group is known as the Protos. Ultimately, the head of the Eastern Orthodox Church resides in Istanbul––once known as Constantinople––Turkey. At this time, the Turks have passed new laws whose final effect will be to push the central leader and his organization out of Turkey, from whence it will be moved to either Russia or Greece. Naturally, the Greeks prefer this latter scenario and the politics surrounding this move are at once complicated and devious.

Patmos

Solving this murder is going to be difficult because initial findings mean that Kaldis must be privy to the inside workings of the monasteries, and most abbots believe in keeping their own counsel. It is found that the dead monk had been investigating a complex power play within the Church. Andreas and his associate have an uphill battle, as they use every source in their power to find a killer hidden deep in monastic life, surrounded by many people who think he is just an ordinary––or maybe an extraordinary––monk.

Grace Brophy's novel The Last Enemy also takes place at this time of year, but in the location of beautiful Assisi in northern Italy. The evening of Good Friday is traditionally spent observing the procession of many local men and some women carrying a cross through the winding ancient streets of the city as they do penance to shorten their way to heaven after death and as a reminder of a momentous Friday 2000 ago.

1 Corinthians 15:26

The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

While Count Casati and his family watch the procession in a piazza near their home, they wait for a traditional fish dinner and for a little beloved niece, Rita, who has been residing with them since she brought her mother's body to be buried in Assisi. They wait in vain, because Rita has met her death in the family mausoleum. She is found the following morning resting on a stone altar step and posed in a fashion that suggests she was raped.

Because of the prominence of the family involved, Commissario Alessandro Cenni, the head of the special task force that deals with terrorism and politically sensitive domestic crimes, is assigned to bring about a fast resolution to the case. While he finds that the local police and the powers that be want the blame to settle on either a foreigner or a vagrant, Alex is confident that the killer had to have known the victim well––and that puts the powerful Casati family in the spotlight. But this is Italy, where connections are more powerful than the facts. The story moves at a lively pace and ends with an Italian twist.

Brophy transports the reader to a lovely part of Italy that I hope to be able to see one day. Alex Cenni is an intriguing, complex character who is believable, likeable and a bit of a romantic. I am happy to report that there is more to this series, the latest of which is being released this year.

Louise Penny takes a lighter approach to the Easter holidays as The Cruelest Month begins with an Easter egg hunt, which is part of the Easter ritual practiced on this side of the Atlantic. This title also comes from a quotation by a favorite poet of mine, T. S. Eliot.

"April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire…"

Shakespeare also used the phrase, but when Penny uses it she refers to the fact that not all things come to life in the spring; some things die or are murdered. In this case, a psychic visiting the Canadian village of Three Pines is persuaded to lead a séance at the spooky old Hadley House and one of the townspeople in the circle appears to have died from fright. Holding a séance on Easter Sunday turned out not to be a good idea.

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache returns to the lovely area to investigate the death. As in all his cases, he works with a delicate, intuitive touch. He is a bit hampered on this occasion, because there is a plot afloat within the police intended to discredit Gamache, in addition to which he has become aware that one of his team is a mole reporting on all his actions to someone in the Montreal police hierarchy. Nonetheless, this consummate professional resolves these situations before Easter week is out.

These mysteries take you from the very solemn to the fun in a way in a way that only a good book can do. You can appreciate and enjoy different forms of Easter celebrations––all without moving beyond your doorstep.

Meteoric Local Legends

My good friend Georgette is not the only one who reads the satirical newspaper The Onion. I'm sincerely hoping that God does not read it or at least skips the horoscope section because a few weeks ago my horoscope said, "You've always wanted to become a local legend, so please enjoy your fame as The Guy Who Smoked at the Gas Station and Everyone in the Next Town Thought Was a Meteor." I wouldn't mind being well-known but not at the price of becoming a human Roman candle. The characters in the following books may not share my astrological sign but they still achieve local fame in rather meteoric ways.

"Tran, Tran, and Hok broke through the heavy end-of-wet season clouds. The warm night air rushed against their reluctant smiles and yanked their hair vertical. They fell in a neat formation, like sleet. There was no time for elegant floating or fancy aerobatics; they just followed the rusty bombshells that were tied to their feet with pink nylon string.

"Tran the elder led the charge. He was the heaviest of the three. By the time he reached the surface of the Nam Ngum reservoir, he was already ahead by two seconds. If this had been the Olympics, he would have scored a 9.98 or thereabouts. There was barely a splash. Tran the younger and Hok-the-twice-dead pierced the water without so much as a pulse-beat between them.

"A quarter of a ton of unarmed ordnance dragged all three men quickly to the smooth muddy bottom of the lake and anchored them there. For two weeks, Tran, Tran, and Hok swayed gently back and forth in the current and entertained the fish and algae that fed on them like diners at a slow-moving noodle stall."

So begins The Coroner's Lunch by Colin Cotterill. These poor tortured Vietnamese soldiers fall into the Laotian lake like meteors without the blaze. When their bodies are discovered, however, they will provide the new national coroner of Laos with a flaming headache. Tran, Tran and Hok have the potential to become an international incident.

It is 1976, a year after Communists came to power in Laos. Siri fought with the Communists out of love for his wife but when the fighting was over he expected to retire. Unfortunately, doctors are in very short supply and the reluctant Siri is drafted to become coroner. He has no formal training in performing autopsies and there are few supplies, textbooks or assistants to help him. Yet Siri goes about his business. Hacking through red tape and cover-ups, Siri tackles the suspicious death of a local Communist leader's wife, the surfacing of the Vietnamese soldiers in the lake and a series of deaths in northern Laos.

The Coroner's Lunch is the first of a seven-book series. It's an unusual series in many ways: the exotic Southeast-Asian locale, a look at life under a Communist regime in the 1970s, an irreverent coroner protagonist in his 70s and the combination of serious and farcical writing. Cotterill employs vivid imagery and unique characters. He is respectful of Laotian culture and traditions while skewering bureaucrats and finding humor in life's tragedies. If an outlandish plot element occasionally strains belief or one plot thread is weaker than others, it really doesn't matter.

This series is a great find and Cotterill's books only get better: Thirty-three Teeth (Siri must identify some badly charred corpses, investigate a creature killing people in the capital and explain why citizens are falling to their deaths from a ministry building) and Disco for the Departed (Siri investigates a corpse entombed in cement at the former home of the President in remote Vieng Xai) are wonderful. Next month, readers get a timely holiday present because Soho Press will publish Cotterill's Slash and Burn. I can't wait. One of these days I'll visit Southeast Asia but for now, I'll read about Dr. Siri Paiboun.

Our next local legend is Sovereign of the Deep Wood, who is "the approximate size and shape of a snow blower." He is a wild boar, the town mascot in Nancy Mauro's debut, New World Monkeys. The boar is owned by Skinner, a man you'd rather not cross, so it's not an auspicious beginning to life in the fictional town of Osterhagen, New York when Lily and Duncan's Saab collides with Sovereign of the Deep Wood as they arrive in town. Tellingly, Lily attempts to grab the Saab's steering wheel away from Duncan moments before impact and then mercifully kills the severely injured boar with the tire iron when Duncan can't.

Duncan and Lily are only in their early 30s but they fight with the zeal of a couple who's been incarcerated for a lifetime in a flamboyantly unhappy marriage. When Lily inherits an old Victorian in upstate New York, she and Duncan see this as an opportunity for change. Lily can get moving on her Ph.D. dissertation in pre-Renaissance architecture while Duncan commutes to his job at a Manhattan ad agency. Things are bound to look up personally and professionally. And pigs, like meteors, can fly.

This is an eccentric book containing eccentric characters (including a sexual deviant), an eccentric plot (including a backyard grave) and eccentric writing (I've never seen so many adjectives, similes and metaphors in one book in my life). The characters are for the most part unlikeable even though I empathized at times with all of them. Mauro's writing is imaginative but so stuffed with sentence modifiers it nearly bursts at the seams. This book isn't for everyone, certainly not for people searching for stripped-down prose and a speeding plot. I did have fun reading it and I suggest it to someone who likes black humor and satire and is looking for a book by a creative new writer. I'm glad to hear Mauro is working on her second novel now because I plan to look for it.

Meanwhile, I can take heart from avoiding a fiery (or other) demise. My most recent horoscope is more promising: "You may not be an expert on which snakes are poisonous and which aren't, but damn it, you know a cuddly one when you see it." You're darn tootin', I do.