POINT FURY

Debut thriller that proves more confusing than thrilling.

It’s déjà-Shining all over again. Chris Nielsen has just been dumped by his band and his girlfriend, and he needs work. He arrives at the home of a family friend to act as caretaker for a winter, a job he thinks of as a kind of private rehab for his sadness and coke habit. Ted Harper, the house’s owner, seems normal at first, but right on cue Chris meets a neighbor, the conveniently available Caroline, an actress (she’s a “full-on knockout”), with whom Chris’s brief affair, including an appearance from a madman ex-beau, is so perfect it seems scripted. Or is. Not even masturbation helps after Caroline’s departure, and in just a few days Chris is suicidal. But, then, after all, it’s his depression that reveals the rottenness in Denmark: Gee, Chris thinks, Caroline’s not tan as she should be if she’s really from California, and soon he’s on the trail of a mystery. He finds Caroline, really Karen, working in New York, and thus he seduces Ted Harper’s—because he’s obviously the one behind all this, whatever it is—mistress, ruining Harper’s marriage in the process. Harper turns out to be some kind of Mafia/Vietnam guy, and now we’re headed for Paul Auster territory, with Chris soon being held prisoner at the house, an indentured servant to carry out Harper’s plan to defoliate the coastline. H-m-m. We’re never sure what the stakes of all this are, and when Harper goes into a chapters-long story of a love affair 25 years earlier with Lei Ling, a VC spy, we’re every bit as confused as Chris is. A sublime writer might have carried the thin plot along, but Maxwell’s prose is barely YA, often conversational in, like, a really cool way.

Starts as Stephen King, tries for more, and flops.