The Black Brook by Drury, Tom - 1998

Boston / New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. First Edition. Hard Cover. Good/Very Good. 5x1x8. Signed by author. Signed by author without inscription. First edition. Faint smell of smoke. Very Good. 1998 Hard Cover. 319 pp. "It was a dry, dusty summer day in New Hampshire. Paul and Mary Emmons were having lunch in a diner called Happy's when Mary happened to notice a dog in a car in the parking lot with his head turned upside down." Thus begins the strange and captivating saga of Paul Nash, a.k.a. Paul Emmons, a fallen accountant whose inadvisable return to New England, the region of his crimes, sets the stage for this darkly comic novel of love, death, guilt, redemption, and the various forms of clam chowder. More than a dog's head gets turned upside down in the course of Paul's transatlantic misadventures, as gangsters analyze the work of John Singer Sargent, a ghostly swimmer speaks in a lost language of household hints from 1929, and a mysterious maroon van gets the last word. Through it all Paul strives to find and accomplish his mission in life, and myriad characters contrive to tell their stories - of unkept promises, nightmarish evenings, identities lost and found.