ANDROMEDA GRAPHIKA

A reporter on the trail of a missing woman finds herself embroiled in pornography and weird rituals in this labyrinthine mystery.

Andromeda Chamberlain, a freelance journalist with preternatural self-possession and a cheek scar that doesn’t spoil her looks, gets a strange assignment from an anonymous editor to write about Margot Vaughn. Margot hasn’t been heard from for a decade, since she ran away from home at the age of 15. Despite odd provisos—Andromeda has to wear a titanium collar at all times—the enormous fee seals the deal. Andromeda jets to Miami to see Margot’s father but turns up no leads. Then a homeless man gives her a DVD of an artsy porn movie starring Margot that’s full of symbolic references to ancient Greek rites. That clue sends Andromeda to Los Angeles, where she loses a tail by borrowing a porn distributor’s car in exchange for a promise to do a soft-core video. Soon, she’s off to Paris, where she discovers that scandalous avant-garde filmmaker Orlando Gidding directed Margot’s movie. Later, Andromeda attends a costume ball in Venice, where she gets chloroformed, tied up, undressed, and injected with psychedelics in front of an audience. Unfazed, she travels to a medieval Scottish abbey where Orlando is completing his film version of Faust. But before he’ll answer questions about Margot, Andromeda must find five keys he has hidden in the abbey by investigating cryptic clues. The sexual tone and mythological resonances of Brace’s yarn feel like a mashup of the John Fowles novel The Magus and Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut, replete with swanky furnishings, ruminations on art, and casual nudity. Andromeda is an uneven hero, quick-witted but passive, suggestible, and led by artificial plot twists. Although given to jarring intellectual digressions (“The free-market is…a chaos of irrationality operating within a tightly bounded space: a Feyerabendian tumult within a Foucaultian constellation of power relations”), Brace is a talented writer. The author’s canny prose finds sharp, inchoate conflict (“She can feel slight pressure from the pad of his thumb under her jaw pushing upward, whether to ease access to her lips to be kissed or to her neck to be strangled she does not know”) in the most innocuous situations.

A somewhat contrived but atmospheric and psychologically rich tale of erotic and philosophical enigmas.