HEAVENLY BLUES

Albedo’s character-driven novel follows a mysterious doctor from Texas.

Book 3 in this series follows Albedo’s prior work, Cannibal Club (2022), with a further investigation of Dr. Chase Callaway. Chase was an ace medical student who left west Texas for better things in California. As it turned out, California was not kind to him. He returned to the Lone Star State with the best of intentions, but things got weird for him. This installment picks up with Chase’s former classmate Will Glenndenning. Will managed to drop out of both medical school and a doctoral program in microbiology. He is a self-proclaimed “omega male” who wears Tommy Bahama shirts and once dreamed of writing detective stories. Will believes that “life is random and without purpose.” He also believes, as do most people, that Chase Callaway is dead. Chase died in a fire; although, as Will starts to piece together, maybe he didn’t. He speaks to Chase’s 85-year-old mother as well as Nola, a strange woman who can’t physically produce tears. Will’s journey will lead him to understand that there is much more to his overachieving, foosball-mastering pal than he could have ever dreamed. Albedo’s twisty novel starts slowly. The reader gets the full infodump on Will and his less-than-spectacular life before the plot finally arrives at its crux. And that crux is to discover the ever evolving and peculiar tale of Dr. Callaway. This tale, like the previous installments, involves entanglements with bureaucracy too convoluted to explain here, but once the work gains steam, it doesn’t let up. Unexpected, interesting topics abound. Concepts from Emanuel Swedenborg, a Christian theologian and philosopher born in the 1600s, to the language Solresol generate pages worth thinking about. The final chapters do not disappoint.

A slow start morphs into an intriguing exploration of unusual ideas.