THE IDEA PEOPLE

In Lubow’s novel set in the late 1980s, a dissatisfied advertising executive finds himself investigating a missing-person case.

Thirty-five-year-old Benjamin Franklin Green of Chicago ad agency Swift, Pope & Fielding has masterminded successful campaigns for such products as Granny Annie’s soup, packaged in jars (“one simple word in bold, tightly packed letters. UNCANNY”). But after accidentally falling through a paneled conference room wall during a meeting, an embarrassed Ben leaves the building, leaves the city, and hops a plane to Los Angeles. He decides to write a coffee-table book comparing advertising images to reality, and he visits an old colleague, Andrew Beale Cole, and his wife to tell them all about it. While Ben is there, the Coles receive a phone call from someone claiming to have kidnapped their 21-year-old daughter, Abby. Cole asks Ben to travel to Colorado, where Abby disappeared, and help a private investigator track his daughter down. He believes that “idea man” Ben will “find a new slant. A way to solve it.” Before long, the Chicagoan is entangled in an adventure involving falconry, a gun-wielding loner nicknamed Rambo, crossbow-carrying poachers, and a suspenseful trek through the Colorado wilderness. Amateur ad-exec detectives are certainly a rarity in the genre, and Lubow does a fine job of establishing Ben’s analytical mind and off-kilter perspective. It results in striking images, even of mundane actions: “She waved at him, not with the whole hand, just her fingers lined up like little people, all bending at the waist, up down, up down.” The mystery itself takes lively detours and has an unexpected resolution. However, the novel is dragged down by the fact that Ben is incapable of interacting with women without sleazily gauging their sexual attractiveness. The female characters feel underdeveloped, as well; one woman’s most distinctive feature is that she spends a good portion of the book “naked but for a knife belt,” and another key character is topless when Ben first sees her; he notes “how her bosom shook when she talked…and didn’t stop after she’d stopped, but kept on jiggling.”

A promising but relentlessly lascivious detective tale.