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THE DISAPPEARING BODY by David Grand Kirkus Star

THE DISAPPEARING BODY

by David Grand

Pub Date: March 5th, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-50034-3
Publisher: Nan A. Talese

The intricate plotting of traditional noir novels (and perhaps specifically the honeycombed structures of James Ellroy’s contemporary updatings of them) are expertly echoed and parodied in this terrific second novel by Grand, author of the oddball Kafkaesque debut novel Louse (1998).

Set in a city much like 1930s New York, just after the repeal of Prohibition, it’s a vertiginously intricate tale that begins when 30ish Victor Ribe is released from prison after 15 years served for murders he didn’t commit. Grand weaves back and forth in time, patiently unearthing the buried connections among Victor’s drug-addicted past; incidents of strike and sabotage at the Fief munitions plant; ANB (Alcohol and Narcotics Bureau) Commissioner Harry Shortz’s compromised senatorial candidacy; physician-abortionists père et fils Jerome and Arthur Brilovsky and their intimacy with the circle of opium-addicted socialite art patron Celeste Martin; Fief dispatcher Freddy Stillman’s despairingly overextended long dark night of the soul; and the research of tough-gal reporter Faith Rapoport—whose father Sam had covered Ribe’s murder trial. By the time shady p.i. Benny Rudolph realizes he has “been taking part in a plot he couldn’t see clearly in his mind,” readers will have long since felt the same way. But Grand somehow pulls it all together, keeping us hooked with his zesty, over-the-top period prose (“He looked as sad as a clarinet with a splintered reed”) and lively array of mysteriously mutually involved suspicious characters. Grand’s brilliant plot is too . . . well, grand to give away. But you may as well know that crooked narcotics cops and politicos figure in it, along with several duplicitous dames who conceal rather more than their plunging décolletages might lead you to guess, and that if Victor Ribe (remember him?) actually was framed, it may have had something to do with the aftershocks of the Russian Revolution, and a purloined painting (entitled “The Disappearing Body”) executed, so to speak, by folk artist Evgeny Rodhinsky.

Treat yourself to this one.