Featured Booktalk: It all started with a wrong number. Someone thought Daniel Quinn was someone he was not. Quinn lives his life writing mystery novels under the name William Wilson, so when he is called to be a detective through a newly acquired identity of Paul Auster, Quinn lives minute-to-minute for this special case trying to protect Peter Stillman from a mental father who will murder him.
This may as well help Quinn as a writer and keep him occupied until his next novel, except that the only Paul Auster in New York isn’t a detective and the Stillmans have disappeared completely along with their case. Who knows, but himself, if Daniel Quinn will cease to exist?
A post –existentialist detective story with a puzzle of mistaken identities, the City of Glass will keep you in suspense until the next book in The New York Trilogy.
Rating: Five Stars*****
Genre: Mystery
Awards: Nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Mystery
Summary: The first volume of The New York Trilogy introduces Daniel Quinn, a mystery novel writer who is known to his readers as William Wilson, and virtually unknown to anyone, but himself. With a late son and wife, as well as a break between novels, a mis-dialed number in the middle of the night sends Quinn into a case where he is assumed to be the Paul Auster that will protect a Peter Stillman from a mental case of a father that is about to be released from jail, and will try to kill him. Quinn is on the case as a 'real' detective, except after months of work he finds that there isn't a detective named Paul Auster that exists in New York City, the Stillmans' have vanished, and the father has committed suicide.
Evaluation: A fantastic read that is written intelligently and mysteriously. The puzzle of identities is not one that typical detective novel fans will pick up right away, but it is a nice, varied direction from the genre. This is also a good choice for those who do not typically read detective novels, but are looking for light suspense. The history of each character is intriguing where the Peter Stillman is running away from a father that is a professor and once obsessed with the Tower if Babel and how natural languages come into existence. The insanity of Peter having been locked in a room for nine years is mind boggling. The post-existential identities and questionable existence of Quinn will leave one craving the next book in the series.
Read-a-likes: Ghosts (Book 2) and Locked Room (Book 3) by Paul Auster
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
City of Glass was adapted in 1994 into a critically-acclaimed experimental graphic novel by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli. It was published as City of Glass: A Graphic Mystery in 2004.
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