|
[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
Restoration comedy meets Edgar Allen Poe in this wickedly funny and gruesome new crime novel about apartment hunting in Manhattan. Real estate prices in the city are criminally high, with studio apartments no bigger than the average suburban closet renting for $2,000 a month - when you can find one. Cyrus, a millionaire recluse turned serial killer, runs classified advertisements for a surprisingly affordable basement apartment. The hapless renters appearing at his door are desperate for shelter, at any price, including their lives. But Cyrus isn't the only criminal in Manhattan working the classified section. Tye, an expatriate from London as amoral as she is beautiful, works a contact at a travel agency to discover who will be leaving town and their apartments free for a few weeks. She runs a classified ad and rents the apartment as a sublet to everyone who answers it, netting tens of thousands of dollars in one easy afternoon. One of the victims of these scams is Quinn, a charming and articulate Irish American who has done quite well socially as a writer, without having written anything more challenging than the aphorisms slipped into fortune cookies. Another victim is Gus and Susie, newly wed and newly arrived from Michigan. Other characters and victims include Quinn's sharp-elbowed grandmother, Molly, Tye's rotter of an ex-boyfriend, an artist, a con man posing as a Hollywood producer, a television news journalist and her girlfriend and several oleaginous broadcast news types. Chris Niles winds all these characters up in the first few chapters and then lets them go, to careen wildly through the succeeding chapters to great hilarious effect. Which characters will run into Cyrus and which Tye? Niles generates considerable tension by adroitly maneuvering her characters between the two, as the reader tries to guess who might lose their rental deposit and who will fall victim to the greater loss of life. The humor is darker than Manhattan in a blackout, but Niles also treats her primary characters with compassion. The humor is sharp but never cruel. This reader was whisked along on great gusts of laughter, his eyes riveted by the deft pacing and suspense, to a very gratifying finale. Paperback also available in the UK from Pan, published in February, 2001. 
Reviewed by Robert Eversz, March 2002
[ Top ]
QUICK SEARCH:
Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]
|
