FLOREAT LUX

In this novel, a young woman may be serving as Satan’s secretary.

At the beginning of Brace’s story, Sabrina Lancaster is working on her law school dissertation on the life and career of Supreme Court Justice Mariano Scaglietti when the object of her studies suddenly dies. His sister engages Sabrina to go through her brother’s papers. In that collection (in the judge’s copy of Blackstone, of course), she finds a document connecting Scaglietti with a mysterious Welshman named Aneurin Bronaryre in which the justice makes reference to “the greatest possible abomination before the eyes of God and man.” In response to a query about this odd passage, Sabrina receives an invitation from Bronaryre’s lawyer, Thomas Ravenscroft, to meet him in London in order to learn more about the mysteries running through the vast Scaglietti archive she’s been exploring. Scaglietti was a hyperintelligent and combative figure, and the fact that he ended his letter to Bronaryre by writing “with the utmost ill will” intrigues Sabrina enough to strain her graduate student budget in order to travel overseas. She’s hunting for answers about the letter and Bronaryre, an extremely reclusive figure with no internet presence. She soon enough meets the man (“the type of person who when walking into a room subtly changes the atmosphere, someone whose presence injects a certain frisson”). Ravenscroft offers her a faculty position teaching aboard the United States, a floating university funded by Bronaryre. Furthermore, Bronaryre wants her to be his amanuensis, commissioned to write his story—the account of a man whose attorney calls him the devil.

Brace throws everything but the kitchen sink into this ample, digressive narrative. One of Sabrina’s first intimations that she’s dealing with supernatural forces comes early in the novel, when she’s leaving Bronaryre’s house and sees Benjamin Franklin arrive for a visit. But even a simple conversation with both Bronaryre and Ravenscroft (and all of their associates) is enough to suggest the unusual. Their every utterance is as saturated with historical references as the rest of the tale. The Jesuits, the Crusades, the Rosicrucians, the houses of York and Lancaster, the Freemasons, Pascal, Mark Rothko, multiple languages (extant and dead), endless trivia on books, religion, cocktails, poetry, art, opera—Brace brings virtually an entire obscurantist’s encyclopedia into the narrative. He employs an archaic 19th-century writing style with relish. His characters, even seemingly normal Sabrina, all talk in the stilted diction of an Oscar Wilde play, but Brace displays such eloquence and such a firm control of pacing that none of this overstuffing ever comes across as off-putting or artificial. At one point, Sabrina wonders if “maybe the Devil is disinclined to irony,” but that’s hardly borne out in the story, where every character indulges in all shades of irony. The author’s artful coup de grace is the construction of the connection between Bronaryre’s long, intricate history and Scaglietti.

An intriguing and multilayered supernatural thriller with narrative roots digging deep into history.