My Darling Detective

A witty, engrossing homage to noir from National Book Award finalist Howard Norman Jacob Rigolet, a soon-to-be former assistant to a wealthy art collector, looks up from his seat at an auction--his mother, former head librarian at the Halifax Free Library, is walking almost casually up the aisle. Before a stunned audience, she flings an open jar of black ink at master photographer Robert Capa's "Death on a Leipzig Balcony." Jacob's police detective fianc�e, Martha Crauchet, is assigned to the ensuing interrogation. In My Darling Detective, Howard Norman delivers an engaging homage to noir, as Jacob's understanding of the man he has always assumed to be his father unravels against the darker truth of Robert Emil, a Halifax police officer suspected but never convicted of murdering two Jewish residents during the shocking upswing of anti-Semitism in 1945. The denouement, involving a dire shootout and an emergency delivery--it's the second Rigolet to be born in the Halifax Free Library in a span of three decades--is Howard Norman at his "provocative . . . haunting"* and uncannily moving best. *Janet Maslin, New York Times