Closing Time

Starred review from August 6, 2001
This first novel by the Wall Street Journal
music critic mixes a noirish, suspense-packed story and sharply defined characters, including Diddio, an affable, spacey music critic. Two years earlier, a lunatic pushed writer/researcher Terry Orr's acclaimed artist wife and their infant son beneath a subway train, leaving Terry and his precocious 10-year-old daughter, Bella, bereft. Impatient with the slow-moving official investigation, Terry took out a private detective's license so he could catch Raymond Montgomery Weisz, the elusive suspect. One strand of this often violent story follows guilt-ridden, obsessive Terry's fruitless search for Weisz. Another concerns his inquiry into the murder of a livery cab driver. When a bomb explodes at a SoHo art gallery and severely injures the owner, Terry takes on that case, too. The investigations lead from an academically challenging private school for African-American children in Harlem to the bars and studios of cutting-edge artists in lower Manhattan. Fusilli is an imaginative, daring writer, creating a pulsating, nightmarish Manhattan where position and appearance are deceptive. Terry and Bella are a closely knit father and daughter rebuilding their lives while exorcising the tragedy in their past. Fusilli contrasts this loving relationship with the horrors of disintegrating families and child prostitution Terry uncovers elsewhere. The separate cases don't so much combine as collide after Terry makes a few intuitive leaps. Readers will anxiously await the sequel to this outstanding debut. (Sept. 10)Forecast:Robert B. Parker, Thomas Perry, Harlan Coben and Nevada Barr supply advance praise, but this first novel will appeal, strongly, to the same readership as that for Dennis Lehane and Michael Connelly.