The Manual of Detection

December 8, 2008
Set in an unnamed city, Berry's ambitious debut reverberates with echoes of Kafka and Paul Auster. Charles Unwin, a clerk who's toiled for years for the Pinkerton-like Agency, has meticulously catalogued the legendary cases of sleuth Travis Sivart. When Sivart disappears, Unwin, who's inexplicably promoted to the rank of detective, goes in search of him. While exploring the upper reaches of the Agency's labyrinthine headquarters, the paper pusher stumbles on a corpse. Aided by a narcoleptic assistant, he enters a surreal landscape where all the alarm clocks have been stolen. In the course of his inquiries, Unwin is shattered to realize that some of Sivart's greatest triumphs were empty ones, that his hero didn't always come up with the correct solution. Even if the intriguing conceit doesn't fully work, this cerebral novel, with its sly winks at traditional whodunits and inspired portrait of the bureaucratic and paranoid Agency, will appeal to mystery readers and nongenre fans alike.

January 1, 2009
In a giant and rigidly bureaucratic agency, Charles Unwin is the personal clerk for legendary detective Travis Sivart. The detail-minded Unwin loves his job, but when Sivart suddenly goes missing, Unwin is unwillingly promoted to fill the vacancy. He only wants to solve one case: he wants to find Sivart so he can go back to being a clerk. In his first novel, Berry has created a wonderful and fantastic world, a vintage mystery seen through a hall of fun-house mirrors. Sivarts cases have names like The Man Who Stole November Twelfth; a villain is the nefarious biloquist Enoch Hoffmann; chapters begin with koan-like excerpts from the Manual of Detection. Unwins adventures take him through rain-slicked city streets, to a dilapidated carnival run by criminals, and into the dreams of Sivarts murdered supervisor. There are false starts and false identities, double crosses and doppelgngersand theres far more at stake than Unwin can imagine. Occasionally the story gets a little bit lost inside its own puzzle boxes, but this is a remarkably auspicious debut.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)