Titles starting with M from Portsmouth Books

For 20 years Sabine was the assistant of the magician, Parsifal. Deeply in love with him despite his homosexuality, she had to settle for his friendship. After his death, Sabine learns that Parsifal has surviving relatives in Nebraska, so she decides to visit them in an attempt to learn more about his past. In the place where her beloved came of age, she slowly pieces together the mystery of the magician's life, and finds herself drawn into the tangled webs of affection and tragedy that drove Parsifal to reinvent himself in the first place.

An aging Cuban-American musician living in a flop house in East Harlem in the early 1980s recalls his youthful success: in 1949, as he and his brother played the dance halls of New York, they became known as the Mambo Kings. Postwar New York was an exciting place for Cesar and Nestor Castillo, and the lush, sensuous music they played, and the many women they loved, are pleasant memories for the ailing Cesar.

A farmer's wife who is also a school nurse has possibly been responsible for the drowning death of a child--and then, in a separate incident, she is accused of molesting a child in her care. These horrifying events and their increasingly tense and thriller-like repercussions raise questions about life in the heartland of America.

Mary and O'Neil--each with a difficult, haunted past--meet, fall in love, marry, and raise a family. They are seemingly ordinary people who live seemingly ordinary lives, but who manage to make peace with their painful histories by learning to love each other and build a world together. Their simple story is told in a series of eight related tales.

A private detective named Lionel "Freakshow" Essrog, who suffers from Tourette's syndrome, is the hero of Lethem's novel, set in a particularly colorful part of Brooklyn. Essrog must track down the murderer of his old friend, and boss, the big-time gangster Frank Minna. A 1999 New York Times Notable Book.