Andrew Klavan
Hunting Down Amanda A Novel
Publisher: HarperCollins, July 7, 1999.
Edition: First
Book Condition: New
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN: 0688168957 / 9780688168957
Lonnie Blake's life and career have been on the skids since his wife was murdered eighteen months ago. Then, one chilly autumn night, Carol Dodson steps suddenly out of the city darkness and asks him to take her in. For that one night, Lonnie and Carol become lovers as Carol, a sometime prostitute, agrees to pretend she's the woman Lonnie loved and tragically lost. Long after Carol is gone, Lonnie remembers her and the passion she rekindled in him, the passion he thought had died. Finally, obsessed, he begins to follow her - and so is led on by desire into a world of sudden danger and sudden death, a swiftly closing trap of intrigue and murder.
from Kirkus Reviews
Edgar-winning Klavan (The Uncanny, 1998, etc.) offers a stylish new thriller that turns on a jazz variation of the Orpheus and Eurydice legend. In a fabulous, Lockerbie-like opening, a 747 jet blows up at 30,000 feet, raining fire from its freshly filled gas tanks on a tourist town below, where houses explode and burning people run everywhere. A lone surviving passenger (vice president of Helix Pharmaceuticals) walks out of the woods without a scratch on him, carrying a little girl named Amanda. Klavan then shifts into the Greek legend. Orpheus is a depressed black tenor sax player, Lonnie Blake, whose wife was murdered two years earlier. When a prostitute named Carol begs him to take her into his apartment and save her from a gravel-faced figure in the night, Lonnie seems to recover his dead wife, Suzanne. But Carol leaves, and Lonnie starts a long chase after her, only to discover she's also being pursued by super-smooth, ice-cold killer Winter (or shall we say, Pluto?). Winter has a vast lech for Carol, but what he really wants is her five-year-old daughter, Amanda, who can heal terminal cancer victims and raise the dead. She and her mother complete the character of Eurydice (or spring-bearing Persephone). Winter is the North American bureau chief of Executive Decisions, a private force that hires itself to companies and countries for bloody covert actions. E.D. has been retained by billion-dollar Helix Pharmaceuticals to recover the offspring of Carol's dead husband, a healer the drug company used for experiments in the genetically enhanced laying-on of hands. A story that opens with dynamite should close with TNT, and Klavans sixth outing does indeed end strikingly on a reversal of the legend. Without the humor that lightened True Crime (1995), it is still certain to please readers who like their entertainment with literary flourishes. And, yes, there is a cave of Tartarean darkness. ($300,000 ad/promo) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Andrew Klavan, a two-time Edgar Award winner and the author of five previous novels, has also worked as a screenwriter; journalist, and freelance news-writer. He lives in London and Connecticut.
Item #947
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