The Mirror Thief

Starred review from January 18, 2016
Seay’s debut novel is a true delight, a big, beautiful cabinet of wonders that is by turns an ominous modern thriller, a supernatural mystery, and an enchanting historical adventure story. The first stop is present-day Las Vegas, where an ex-Marine turned manhunter named Curtis Stone descends into the Strip’s seedy underworld to track a famous gambler named Stanley Glass through the prefab canals of the Venetian-themed hotel and casino, but finds instead a mysterious book called The Mirror Thief. On that note, the narrative jumps back to 1958 in Venice Beach, at the dawn of the Beat poetry scene, where Stanley is a small-time con artist obsessed with the enigmatic Adrian Welles, author of The Mirror Thief. Finally, and most sensationally, readers are treated to the subject of Welles’s book himself, the man called Crivano, who in 1592 embarks on a dangerous mission in the Italian Venice, gorgeously rendered as a fantasia of conspirators, alchemists, and heretics caught between the dangers of plague and the Inquisition. Without realizing it, Crivano, Stanley, and Curtis are searching for the same thing: the mystery hidden behind mirrors (both literal and figurative), through which, as Welles writes, “you meet the stranger you have always been.” In sum, this is a splendid masterpiece, to be loved like a long-lost friend, an epic with near-universal appeal.

March 1, 2016
"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. Since David Mitchell's Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas, every other commercially aspiring literary novel, it seems, jumps around over continents and centuries. 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. The cast of characters is suitably broad but with three principal figures. 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. It also contains a Nicosian ne'er-do-well who, four centuries ago, sets off on a mission that will find him tap-dancing his way out of the clutches of spies and inquisitors. He's a likable rogue, and by far the most interesting fellow in the book. Seay's great challenge is to bind these talky stories together, which he does to varying degrees of success; often the story seems an exercise in stringing together index-card notes on various arcane subjects, and while the book is well-written and admirable in the ambition of its scope, it still feels undercooked. Entertaining enough, if less a hall of mirrors than a house of cards.

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Starred review from April 15, 2016
Seay's seductive debut novel is a grandly entrancing three-ring circus featuring a trio of risk-addicted main characters, three avidly depicted time frames, and an audacious mix of metaphysics and crime punctuated by tightly choreographed action scenes. Former marine Curtis, wounded in Bosnia, is now, at the start of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, reluctantly working as a hired gun in Las Vegas, attempting to track down the legendary and mysterious gambler Stanley Glass. Curtis' ever-more confounding and dangerous quest yields only Stanley's sacred text, a book of poems titled The Mirror Thief. The scene shifts to Venice Beach, California, in 1958, where young Stanley, a grifter and drifter, is searching for the poet who wrote this cryptic account of Crivano, a murderous sixteenth-century doctor on a clandestine mission in Venice, involving alchemy, the new art of mirror-making, the Ottoman court, and the Inquisition. Crivano prowls the city streets just like Curtis patrols Las Vegas' ersatz Venice as each is drawn further into a vortex of intrigue and violence. Mirrors, reflections, deceptions, reversals, and illusions multiply as Seay conjures each world with wizardly exactitude and a phenomenal gift for infusing a convoluted yet suspenseful tale with emotional authenticity, visceral immediacy, and philosophical concerns about perception and truth. Shimmering with intimations of Hermann Hesse, Umberto Eco, and David Mitchell, Sheay's house-of-mirrors novel is spectacularly accomplished and exciting.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)