THE LABYRINTH IN WINTER

The rarified worlds of high finance and grand opera collide in this complex murder mystery.

New York City is in the midst of a cold snap, but things heat up quickly for Devlin Wolfe, a Federal Securities and Exchange Commission investigator, after he happens upon a dead body floating in the Harlem River while rowing one morning. The “distinguished looking” stabbing victim wearing a $2,000 suit is identified as Guillaume Marchand, a financial analyst for Endicott Technologies. Things immediately get more complicated when Marchand’s $7 million estate in Westchester County is burned to the ground and his artist wife goes missing on the eve of an important gallery exhibition. Bixby Endicott, the victim’s former boss, has political ambitions and “the conviction [that] he was set apart by destiny to guide the great American experiment by reason of his ability to amass wealth.” An unexpected subplot provides an intriguing wrinkle in what could have been a cut-and-dried conspiracy thriller; it involves the mounting of a production of the opera Aida with a sensational young French diva who’s giving her debut performance in the United States. Bixby, it turns out, is a late-in-life opera convert who’s transfixed by “the impossible beauty, the unattainable grasped, at the infinite realized.” Blair, the author of Sudden Rivers (2014), writes a novel that exudes a palpable rage against dark money and ruthless puppet masters in pursuit of power. Devlin, his investigator protagonist, is certainly no fan of the rich: “Business was simply the pursuit of profit without the slightest hint of conscience...or any of the qualities that distinguished the civilized from the barbaric.” Over the course of the book, the author also does his best to make financial terms and practices accessible to the lay reader. Thierry Reynard, a police officer, acts as the reader’s surrogate as Devlin explains such concepts as “short selling.” Some of the more florid poetic passages don’t pay off as well, however: “Eidolons travel in the night: they streak above the cirrus clouds between where humans walk and phantoms linger.”

A worthwhile investment for those interested in whodunits, social justice, and the work of Giuseppe Verdi.