BLOOD ACRE by Peter Landesman (Penguin)
There is a sense of inevitability about this elegant noir novel – that awful deeds will out in dark and slimy places, that one cannot run forever from the wreck one has made of people’s lives.
Coney Island during a winter storm is the right place for such a novel to begin. High-rolling criminal lawyer Nathan Stein is there, drinking cold coffee out of a styrofoam cup. The body of his secretary and lover, Isabel Santos – dragged off the boardwalk into the ocean – washes up on Coney Island beach; her brother thinks Stein did it.
Did he? He looks for the answer in sections of New York’s underbelly, among people who owe him and people he’s cheated.
Coney Island is also the right place for the book to end, and Nathan Stein – described by one critic as “a Gatsby for the end of the millennium” – is the right protagonist: flashy and self-involved, connected, obsessive, disreputable.