Amazon.co.uk
In the prime of his successful, happy existence attorney Bill Wyeth suffers a ghastly tragedy that he might have prevented. It robs him of everything and everyone he values--his family, home, wealth and career. His subsequent slide into oblivion is arrested by Allison Sparks, a restaurateur who involves him in a complicated real estate transaction on behalf of her lover, the owner of a valuable parcel of land on Long Island. The circumstances of the last-minute deal are unusual enough to set off warning bells in Wyeth's mind, but he agrees to help Jay Rainey pull it off in exchange for access to the Havana Room, a private club in the basement of Allison's restaurant, whose mysterious members and their activities have long intrigued him.
Handling a complicated plot with consummate ease, maintaining a high level of dramatic tension during a brilliantly paced narrative and creating a complex cast of unusual minor characters as well as a wholly believable, sympathetic protagonist, Colin Harrison has written a riveting novel that grabs the reader from the beginning and doesn't let go. The Havana Room is a terrific, original, engrossing read by a masterful writer. --Jane Adams, Amazon.com
From Publishers Weekly
Harrison's status as the noir poet of New York crime fiction (Afterburn; Manhattan Nocturne) will surely be enhanced by his latest thriller-featuring, among other pleasures, the graphic description of several new and unusual ways to die. What goes on in the by-invitation-only Havana Room of a midtown steakhouse is certainly bizarre-but no odder than what happens in a Long Island potato field when a Chilean wine maker decides to expand his empire. Caught in the middle are two most unlikely heroes: Bill Wyeth, a real estate lawyer whose career and marriage are destroyed by a terrible accident involving a child, and Jay Rainey, a hulking, strangely sympathetic con artist. Linking these two is a touching and complicated woman, Allison Sparks, who manages the steakhouse but longs for more. "She seemed full of humor and fury and sexual need. She arranged people, fixed problems, came to decisions." Although Wyeth and Rainey drive the action, it's Sparks who sets the moral tone of the book. Meanwhile, the lush, alluring steakhouse and its public and private pleasures are the perfect metaphor for a postapocalyptic New York. "It did not matter if you polluted your lungs or liver or gut with the good stuff being served, because a man or a woman's life was itself just a short meal at the table, so to speak, and one had an obligation to live well and live now, to dine heartily by the logic of the flesh." Despite occasional digressions into arcane real estate law and Chinese cuisine, Harrison's storytelling hums and his prose shimmers all the way through this fascinating adventure.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
