Double Solitaire: A Novel
₱1,952.00
Product Description
A tantalizing LA novel fans of Michael Connelly and James Ellroy.
“More than refurbished L.A. Noir. The scenes where Farrell visits with the patients [at UCLA Children’s Hospital], canny judges of character and tuning forks for emotional truth, carry devastating weight, and Nova’s smooth prose brings the roiling undercurrents to the surface. He’s fashioned a series character well worth revisiting. ” —
The New York Times
Quinn Farrell is a modern-day fixer in Los Angeles — he cleans up other people’s messes. Rich people’s messes. For a lot of money. He’s so good that he’s become indispensable to Hollywood moguls and he’s managed to construct a working moral framework so that he can live with himself. That is until a new neighbor moves next door, Rose Marie, who works with terminally ill teens. Against all his survival instincts, Farrell falls in love with Rose Marie and then her uncanny patients, who shine a spotlight into his soul. When a client steps over the line and Farrell is hired to clean up after a reprehensible crime, his carefully constructed ethical house of cards comes crashing down.
Double Solitaire is the first in a series of LA-based thrillers featuring Quinn Farrell,. As with all Nova’s deeply intuitive fiction, Farrell is an unforgettable living force in a setting that needs no fiction to be any weirder than it is: contemporary Hollywood.
Review
From the
New York Times
“Craig Nova’s newest novel,
DOUBLE SOLITAIRE (Arcade CrimeWise, 264 pp., $26.99),
seems to be bathed in cynicism. There’s a Hollywood fixer well on the road to burnout, a spoiled movie star marinating in ugly secrets, a ne’er-do-well arrested for sex with underage girls, a young British woman running headlong into doom and a Burmese python named Scooter. Yes, a python, whose appearance jolts Farrell, the fixer, out of his own unrelenting miasma and lets the reader see this novel as
something more than refurbished L.A. noir.
The snake resides with (but does not belong to) Rose Marie, who is Farrell’s new neighbor and — to their surprise, but hardly mine — burgeoning love interest. Rose Marie works with terminally ill teenagers at U.C.L.A. Children’s Hospital.
The scenes where Farrell visits with the patients, canny judges of character and tuning forks for emotional truth, carry devastating weight, and
Nova’s smooth prose brings the roiling undercurrents to the surface.
The journey can’t quite move past typical noir thematics, as Farrell must attempt to be moral in an amoral sphere. But that’s no knock, and
Nova has fashioned a series character well worth revisiting.”—Sarah Weinman,
The New York TImes
“A Hollywood producer hires L.A. fixer Quinn Farrell, the winning protagonist of this excellent series launch…A highly talented stylist, Nova complements Farrell’s moral and existential angst with some trenchant observations on L.A. … Noir fans will hope to see a lot more of Farrell.” —
PW (starred review)
“For readers who enjoy the gritty mysteries of James Ellroy or Michael Connelly.” —
Library Journal
“Reading a new Craig Nova novel is thrilling. He’s one of our very best writers, creating characters who walk a knife blade sharpened with bleak humor as they simultaneously act out their dangerously excessive plans. The figurative language in
Double Solitaire sometimes immerses us more deeply, sometimes lifts us out of a creepy, convincing nightmare; it’s up to us where we land. When Craig’s not looking at America head-on, it’s in his peripheral vision. He’s amazing.”
—
Ann Beattie
“Craig Nova has really done it this time. He hooked me in the first paragraph and reeled me in on page nine. Writing with great style and economy, a master of dialogue and suspense, Nova plumbs the depths of the human psyche. Menace and heartbreak walk hand in hand through these swift pages. I’ll take another trip with Quinn Farrell anytime.”—
Lee Smith, bestselling author of
Blue Marlin
“Nova is a proven master