One is a salty, hard-boiled private investigator with a quick temper and a potty mouth (“fuck it, fuck Damon for putting some sketchy shitbag onto him without giving him a heads-up”) who falls into the ambit of a sometime gambler, sometime philosopher (“At any given moment, you may be certain of the cards, but the other man-your opponent, your mark-you can never be certain of what he perceives, what he thinks, what he will do”) who just happens to know a little something about a book, called, of course, The Mirror Thief, one that is in demand for the odd power it enfolds. The cast of characters is suitably broad but with three principal figures. This is no exception, with the perhaps unfortunate nexus of the Venices of California and Italy and the Venetian hotel of Las Vegas and a time span joining the Renaissance to the present by way of the Beat era. Since David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas, every other commercially aspiring literary novel, it seems, jumps around over continents and centuries. “What do you know about the sephiroth? Or gematria?” What, indeed? Cabala and codex, mystery and melodrama-it’s all here in this debut novel.
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