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Carregando... An Honest Living: A Novelde Dwyer Murphy
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Registre-se no LibraryThing tpara descobrir se gostará deste livro. Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro. As a New Yorker, there was much to love in this book--from an author and main character who also clearly love NYC. But as a story? It was weak sauce, punctuated with only a few good moments. It failed as a meaningful mystery, nor did it deliver on any real noir-ish premise. Alas. ( ) This novel follows a down-on-his-heels lawyer living in New York City in a railroad apartment and doing whatever jobs come his way to make ends meet. He's hired by a mysterious woman to see if the husband she's divorcing is trying to sell some valuable legal booklets that belong to her. The money is good and the job is easy, until our protagonist discovers that the woman who hired him was not who she said she was. And so he becomes involved with the woman who was impersonated, someone equally mysterious to him, as he tries to make amends for what he was tricked into doing and to find out who hired him and why. This is heavily marketed at noir. In descriptions and reviews the terms "hard-boiled" and "homage to noir" are thrown around like confetti. The protagonist sure seems like the kind of detective one found in a classic noir; he's sort of world weary, but also compassionate and in love with the version of New York he lives in, in which the chains stores and luxury apartments have been replaced with colorful neighborhoods full of friendly bars and diners. So by the time I figured out that "noir" was referring only to the stage setting and not at all to the story, which is absolutely cozy in tone, without a hint of danger, I was taken enough with the decor not to mind too much. The main character is a likable guy, who knows a lot of interesting people and just hanging out with him as he wanders around sort of working on solving a case that involves some high level wheeling and dealing, but only marginal amounts of crime, none violent or even menacing (the tensest moment in this novel is our guy sneaking out of a house early to avoid being roped into a fishing trip) is pretty pleasant. There's some nice stuff about old books, some long walks through Manhattan, a few drinks and what is less a conclusion, let alone a climax of any sort, than just the end of the novel, the lawyer's life as he walks away essentially the same as when he walked on stage. This book was nice. I liked it fine. Noir it ain't. When a lawyer in New York City leaves his corporate job he decides to free lance and dabble in a little detective work on the side. His first major client is a lady novelist who is suspicious that her much older husband is selling some of her valuable books without her knowledge. This gets the protagonist involved in the world of the antiquarian book market. As the plot develops her husband goes missing and the mystery deepens. A fast moving plot with a unique story line. Worth a look. sem resenhas | adicionar uma resenha
"A sharp and stylish debut from the editor-in-chief of CrimeReads in which an unwitting private eye gets caught up in a crime of obsession between a reclusive literary superstar and her bookseller husband, paying homage to the noir genre just as smartly as it reinvents it. After leaving behind the comforts and the shackles of a prestigious law firm, a restless attorney makes ends meet in mid-2000s Brooklyn by picking up odd jobs from a colorful assortment of clients. When a mysterious woman named Anna Reddick turns up at his apartment with ten thousand dollars in cash and asks him to track down her missing husband Newton, an antiquarian bookseller who she believes has been pilfering rare true crime volumes from her collection, he trusts it will be a quick and easy case. But when the real Anna Reddick-a magnetic but unpredictable literary prodigy-lands on his doorstep with a few bones to pick, he finds himself out of his depth, drawn into a series of deceptions involving Joseph Conrad novels, unscrupulous booksellers, aspiring flâneurs, and seedy real estate developers. Set against the backdrop of New York at the tail end of the analog era and immersed in the worlds of literature and bookselling, An Honest Living is a gripping story of artistic ambition, obsession, and the small crimes we commit against one another every day"-- Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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Google Books — Carregando... GênerosClassificação decimal de Dewey (CDD)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyClassificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos E.U.A. (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia:
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