It's one of those cliches that always rises to the top of a book critic's bag of tricks: "I couldn't out it down."
But I'm here to tell you it's true. I just ripped through two books that were stuck like glue to my fingers. i read them while walking, while standing at the urinal and at night, in those rare quiet moments alone. In fact, I started The Man from Primrose Lane after midnight on a Saturday and what woke me up was my head falling forward into the book around two in the morning.
Couldn't put it down, I tell you.
James Renner creates an absorbing, fascinating world in The Man from Primrose Lane (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26). He begins with a flash of background on the mysterious man in an Ohio town, man known as the man with a thousand mittens, because even in the sweat-strained drench of a Midwestern summer, he always wore mittens. He's a recluse, a well-known oddball. We've all known people like that. Used to be a guy we all called Glovey in one of the towns where I lived. The dude always wore gloves, and always talked to his gloves.
So the man from Primrose Lane is just thought of as another local oddball until one day he doesn't answer his door. He usually hires a local kid to run to the store for him, and that's the only person he sees regularly. But now even the kid can't get him to answer. Then there's the smell. So when the door is forced open, they find the man with a thousand mittens dead, shot through the chest. His fingers have been systematically cut off and turned to a plasma shake in the Osterizer.
All right, James Renner, you got me.
Our central character is David Neff, a reporter at an alt weekly kind of like Creative Loafing. He becomes rich after publishing a book about a serial killer. He never gets to enjoy the taste of success, though, because his wife is dead — a suicide, from driving her car into a wall.
To tell you more would spoil it and one of the great pleasures of the book is to watch the story unspool. Renner keeps us on a short leash. He keeps surprising us, but there's nothing hokey here. The plot turns arise organically from the story.
Things are going great — and then an element of science fiction creeps in. At first, I was disappointed, but I was so invested in the book that I kept going. Eventually, I decided that I'd been short-sighted. I ended up rather liking the semi-supernatural turn.
This article appears in Apr 5-11, 2012.