Features
- Cover Type: Paperback with 384 pages
- Published by: Picador; First Edition edition April 1, 2008
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 031242762X
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0312427627
-
Book Dimensions:
8 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
- Weighs: 12 ounces
Product Review
In this full-bore detective tale of scandal and mayhem in the Big Apple, Colin Harrison whips up noir for the 90s, complete with a jaded newspaperman protagonist, a mysterious femme fatale, exhaustive travelogues of the meat-grinder labyrinth of Manhattan, and an elusive jade figurine. Harrison weds a literary sensibility to this tangled tale, but the pleasures of the novel come mainly from the conventional elements of all detective fiction: the assembling of apparently disconnected pieces into a coherent puzzle.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
If it weren't for the miles of dangerous videotape that snake through this marvelous story, binding its participants to each other and to their ever more elaborate lies, Harrison's latest (after Bodies Electric) could take place in the Manhattan of forty years ago. The nostalgia is so palpable that the opening scenes conjure images of a jaded reporter sidling through the city's midnight shadows, intent on getting "the story." Porter Wren (returning from earlier Harrison novels) is a columnist for a New York daily tabloid, happily married with two kids and a terrifying mortgage, when he's approached at a swank party by a lady who in earlier parlance would have been called a "dame." She's Caroline Crowley, widow of hot young filmmaker Simon Crowley. Not even Wren's native cynicism cues him to Caroline's real intentions until he has compromised himself and his family's safety. Crowley was found mysteriously dead in a Lower East Side lot; more than a year later, his murder remains unsolved, but that doesn't seem to be foremost on Caroline's mind. Her current predicament concerns the monstrous billionaire who owns Wren's paper, and who believes a mystery video that has been turning up repeatedly in his office must be coming from her. All Caroline asks is that Wren find the original video, which has nothing to do with Simon's death?maybe. But as Wren was advised years earlier by a washed-up journalist, "It's all one story." Harrison shows the truth of this maxim as he deftly connects dozens of far-flung characters?a pair of sad, dotty lawyers in Queens, a spurned lover who shot his fiancee, a nanny in Wren's service?and as many Manhattan locales into a breathtaking collage. His prose brims with the anguish and joy, the guilt and regret and recklessness, of hundreds of the city's voices. He proves that it is all one story?and one that will keep readers enthralled. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Reader Reviews
This review is from: Manhattan Nocturne (Paperback)
The first one hundred and fifty pages or so, Colin Harrison had me hooked. "Manhattan..." is the seamy story of a tabloid reporter named Porter Wren who risks not only his own life,but his wife and children's lives as well when he gets mixed up with a mysterious beauty named Caroline Crowley. She asks him to help investigate the murder of her husband, an acclaimed independant film maker ala Quentin Tarantino.As Porter's life begins to careen out of control it's easy to make comparisons with "The Bonfire of the Vanities", seeing as both present New York at it's most deplorable, and the people that inhabit the island not much higher than base animals driven by lust and greed. Although frankly that seems to be Harrison's argument for all of humanity, turning a devilshly good mystery morality war into a depressing and gory romp through the cesspools of The Big Apple. It's very well written, but the end was a letdown. Not just for it's wimpy resolution, but also for making me feel like I should pull a blanket over my head and not leave the house.
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