At first Olenka doesn’t see who it is, but when she does, fear snakes through her: The woman, Darla, was once her colleague at a shady fertility clinic in Ukraine, where Olenka - not her real name - was implicated in the murder of a client. Then, one morning, another woman sits next to her. Wounds bleed and leave a trail and trails can be tracked”) and spends her off-hours at a Helsinki dog park, always watching one particular family but never daring to venture further into connection. Sofi Oksanen’s DOG PARK (Knopf, 356 pp., $28) sets up a remarkably ambitious story from a simple beginning: A woman named Olenka, beaten down by life, mulls her past (“Mistakes are wounds. That it doesn’t, not once, is a testament to her careful and sinewy plotting, which reveals in chilling detail who gets to make art, and who gets subsumed in the process. The spider web of revenge Lattari slowly spins threatens to dissolve at every conceivable turn, or transform into lurid melodrama. “I have so many things to show you, Max,” Audra tells him smoothly when they arrive in Maine. ![]() “Her art, her body - they have grown knotted into one concept within me.”ĭurant is about to discover that Audra is very much aware of his calculating behavior, and that she also knows the secrets these woods have kept since 1988, as well as Durant’s connection to a group of young artists who came together that summer. He is equally certain that Audra will fall prey to his charms, as have so many students past. Durant is certain that the project will be as brilliant and arresting as its creator. But the muscular prose is vivid (“Hate is so tiresome,” one character opines with devastating effect), and the examination of ideology gone rancid is gutting and powerful.Īudra Colfax, the young artist at the center of Katie Lattari’s unnerving suspense novel DARK THINGS I ADORE (Sourcebooks Landmark, 393 pp., $27.99), has decamped to her grandfather’s house in the remote Maine woods with her professor, Max Durant, so that he may view her graduate thesis. It’s also a bit too indebted to the Jim Thompson novels it clearly wants to emulate. The novel, which occasionally overreaches its structural demands, doesn’t reach the heights of Manchette’s best work. ![]() Drawing from real-life events, it recounts how a budding sociopath named Henri Butron, interested solely in his own pleasure despite (or because of) the harm he causes others, gets caught up in an escalating series of crimes involving a prominent African political figure. Now arrives THE N’GUSTRO AFFAIR (New York Review Books, 192 pp., paper, $15.95), first published in 1971, here nimbly translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. His association with the Surrealists, his mordant sense of humor and his profound familiarity with the genre’s masters - many of whom he translated - produced masterpieces like “ The Prone Gunman,” “Fatale” and “Three to Kill.” I’d rather read Manchette than many contemporary noir writers. The publication of another novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette, the French noir writer who died in 1995, is a reason to rejoice.
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