Alex Vander is a fraud, big-time. An elderly professor of literature and a scholarly writer with an international reputation, he has neither the education nor the petit bourgeois family in Antwerp that he has claimed. As the splenetic narrator of this searching novel by Banville (Eclipse), he admits early on that he has lied about everything in his life, including his identity, which he stole from a friend of his youth whose mysterious death will resonate as the narrator reflects on his past. Having fled Belgium during WWII, he established himself in Arcady, Calif., with his long-suffering wife, whose recent death has unleashed new waves of guilt in the curmudgeonly old man.
Unsettled Matters: The Life and Death of Bruce Lee
In August of 1973 while his body was being flown from Hong Kong to Seattle, Washington, Bruce Lee's coffin mysteriously opened and the dye from his dark blue suit bled onto the coffin's white silk interior. The ancient Chinese saw this as a bad omen. "The buried man will not live in peace!" they proclaimed "There are unsettled matters!" Considered one of the foremost authorities on Bruce Lee today, Tom Bleecker not only trained privately with Lee, but the two shared numerous mutual friends in the martial arts community as well as the Hollywood film industry.
Geoffrey Shafer, the Weasel, works in Intelligence in the British Embassy in D.C. He and three twisted friends play a Game of Death that involves unsuspecting women around the world.
A pretty young girl is butchered in her Greenwich Village apartment. The prime suspect dies and NYPD consider the case closed, but Scudder looks into the death for the girl's father. Suddenly he's up to his neck in sleaze and corruption in a world where children must pay for their parents' sins.
John Fiske, a cop turned lawyer, is suddenly summoned by police to identify the body of his estranged brother Mike, purportedly killed by robbers. Sara Evans, a colleague and close associate of Mike is shocked at this tragedy. She remembers having seen Mike dazed and distracted a few days before his death and also had seen an appeal addressed to Supreme Court by a prisoner in Mike's possession which seems to have a sinister connection to Mike's death.
