Summary
"Bill Wyeth is a real estate attorney in his late thirties who seems to have it all: a wonderful wife and son, a successful practice, and all the benefits wealth can bestow. Then, through a devastating twist of fate, he loses everything. Within weeks, he is unmoored and alone, drifting toward the city's darker corners. Wyeth is soon drawn to an old-time Manhattan steakhouse, where he becomes intrigued by the manager, Allison Sparks - sexy, complicated, and independent in all ways. Allison controls access to the restaurant's private bar, the Havana Room - and what goes on in there, he's told, is secret." "To impress Allison, Wyeth agrees to help her friend, Jay Rainey, conclude a last-minute midnight real estate transaction. But once he sees the players and the paperwork, Wyeth knows something is wrong. And before long, he's inextricably ensnared in Rainey's peculiar obsessions, which involve a Chilean businessman who feels he's been swindled, an old farmer frozen dead to a bulldozer, an outrageous black owner of a downtown hip-hop club, and a fourteen-year-old English girl. Only Rainey knows the connections between these people, which are revealed when Wyeth is finally admitted to the Havana Room where the survival of its occupants is most uncertain."--BOOK JACKET. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.
Publishers Weekly Review
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 © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From: Reed Elsevier Inc.
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