From Publishers Weekly
Nova's muted, somewhat bleak novel, set in a Vermont mill town, hints at disaster from its first pages. The product of a catastrophic childhood, Frank Kohler is a loner who "knew he was running out of time." The reader knows it, too, and can feel Frank moving toward some unknown, perhaps lethal cataclysm. Likable state cop Russell Boyd spends most nights on traffic duty, which he rather enjoys, and has a promising new girlfriend in Zofia. Nova (
Wetware, etc.) alternates between these two men as Frank, in a misguided search for love, gets a Russian mail-order bride, Katryna, and Russell lives "the malice and danger of his hour-to-hour" job. The two men cross paths briefly several times, ricocheting off one another before their final confrontation. The reader, lulled by the soporific grace of Nova's prose, watches transfixed as his four players travel inexorably down the paths to their awaiting fates. Nova again demonstrates his control of character, sense of place and ability to create grim worlds that readers might be reluctant to experience at first, but then find hard to resist.
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From Booklist
Nova, an electrifying novelist with a loyal following, ventured into the future in
Wetware (2001), and while he returns to the present in his eleventh novel, it, too, pulses with the menace engendered by the divide between our potent technologies and our old instinctive, reptilian brains. And so it is in this tautly strung tale of two rural New Englanders: Russell Boyd, a cop who scans the highway for speeders, and Frank Kohler, a loner on the brink of a violent crisis. Russell is in love with Zofia, a forthright special-ed teacher. Frank has Katryna, a Russian mail-order bride, but he expects trouble rather than happiness. Clearly, all four are destined to cross paths, and Nova executes their moves like a chess master, all the while ratcheting up the tension and calling into question any sense of security, order, or reason. Like the best of noir, Nova's unsettling novels, serpentine in their structure, speed, and toxic bite, remind us that while dark forces are always present, we must embrace love.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
