The Drowned Detective

March 14, 2016
Jordan, writer and filmmaker (The Crying Game), returns to his favorite theme—that of a missing woman—in this curious new novel. Jonathan is a detective who works for a tracing agency. When he is asked to locate Petra, the missing daughter of a rural couple in an unnamed Eastern European city, he enlists the help of Gertrude, a psychic whose Pomeranian has a luxated patella. She burns a map to guide Jonathan to Petra’s whereabouts, but the mystery of the missing woman soon becomes secondary to Jonathan’s relationship with an unnamed cellist he saves after she jumps off a bridge. Intrigued by her sad beauty, he visits her repeatedly. Are the two women connected? Jordan teases out the answer as Jonathan grapples with the infidelity of his wife, Sarah, while protests and ghosts lurk in the background. As the story unspools, Jordan shows his strengths as a writer in the terrific dialogue and atmospheric imagery. However, what starts out as spellbinding soon becomes underwhelming, never fully delivering on the strong set-up.

May 1, 2016

A peripatetic detective without a clue meanders through the cobbled streets of an unnamed Mitteleuropean city. Originally from Cornwall, he's more or less on a case, looking for a long-lost girl who disappeared decades ago. His wandering feet and mind, though, stray far afield from that investigation. There's his troubled family, the psychic with her pet Pomeranian, the city beautiful in its ruins, and always the Bach cello suites in the background. Jordan, a noted film director (The Crying Game) and novelist (The Past), is a master of sleight of hand, and shows his skill here. What starts off as a gritty hardboiled detective yarn very soon, and almost imperceptibly, glides into a surreal journey through the doors of perception for a stranger in a strange land. VERDICT If you've ever deliberately chosen to amble through the streets of an unfamiliar city, with no map or even Siri in hand, and no destination in mind, you'll enjoy getting lost in this beautifully rendered hallucinatory trip. [See Prepub Alert, 11/13/15.]--Bob Lunn, Kansas City, MO

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