The Grand Complication

Narrated by Alexander Short, a stylish young reference librarian of arcane interests, The Grand Complication propels the reader through a card catalog of desperation and delight, of intrigue and theft. It’s a novel of suspense that comes full circle, with a clock-maker’s precision and a storyteller’s surprise, on page 360.The account begins with Alexander’s job in jeopardy and his marriage destined for the Discard shelf. Enter the improbably named Henry James Jesson III, a bibliophile who hires the librarian for some after-hours research. The task: to render whole an incomplete cabinet of wonders chronicling the life of a mysterious eighteenth-century inventor. As the investigation heats up, Alexander realizes there are many more secrets lurking in Jesson’s cloistered world than those found inside his elegant Manhattan town house. With a notebook tethered to his jacket, Alexander plunges headlong into the search, only to discover that the void in the cabinet is rivaled by an emptiness in his heart.A delicious compendium of quirky colleagues, erotic pop-ups, deviant passions, and miraculous examples of theft, the book is a grand and complicated “timepiece,” told with a devilish sense of fun.(From the colophon: The tiny gear used as a space break is a freehand rendering of an escapement wheel contained inside the Marie Antoinette, Abraham-Louis Breguet’s pocket watch masterpiece. The whereabouts of of the watch, stolen from a Jerusalem museum in 1983, is unknown.)