"Nova is a gifted writer of quotidian violence: car wrecks, suicides, animal poisonings, murder. The macabre steadies his prose. Connoisseurs of this sort of not-quite hard-boiled fiction will find much to admire here."
A complex melodrama, set in Boston, about a third-generation attorney who must come to terms with the tawdry legacy of a manipulative father manipulated by his own father and a willful daughter who falls for the wrong guy.
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"The author's formidable literary gifts are only occasionally on view in an overly ambitious psychological thriller that provides little persuasive psychology and few thrills."
Chaotic historical mystery from Nova (Cruisers, 2004, etc.), who continues his move toward more heavily plotted work.
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"But, even so, the author's spare lyricism and philosophical manner are absorbing, original, and moving."
Another fine novel by the author of, most recently, The Book of Dreams (1994). Dr. Terry McKechnie is working the emergency room during the 1992 riots in Los Angeles, treating victims of substance abuse and gunshot wounds, when Virginia Lee, the woman he's having an affair with, checks in.
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"Enjoy the digressions in Nova's eighth novel (after Trombone, 1992), but don't expect a satisfying narrative payoff or a coherent vision of contemporary Tinseltown."
Nova's Hollywood novel is an ambitious murder/blackmail melodrama full of echoes (Fitzgerald, West, Chandler, even Citizen Kane), but the ambitions get in the way of the melodrama.
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"Nova's eye for human detail and gritty texture is nearly unerring—even while elements of story and character occasionally veer too close to hackneyed genre formulations."
An adolescent's philandering father is training him to be an arnist—until a woman steps between them.
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A disappointing follow-up to The Congressman's Daughter (1986): the patchy, convoluted story of two small-town products of unhappy families who ultimately become lovers—and destroy each other.
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