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First Published:
Apr 2005, 352 pages
Paperback:
Apr 2006, 384 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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What determines your identity? Is it the clothes you wear? The way other people treat you? When private investigator Nick Petrov wakes up in a hospital room everyone treats him like a victim but he can't remember how he got there in the first place. Digging for answers when he doesn't even know the questions, he begins to fear he is searching for the most elusive quarry he has ever hunted: himself.
What determines your identity? Is it the clothes you wear?
The way other people treat you? The stories, anecdotes and experiences you
have stored in your memory? When Nick Petrov wakes up in a hospital room,
his clothes are two sizes too big. Everyone treats him like a victim. And he
can't remember how he got there in the first place.
Nick Petrov is a
brilliant private investigator with a reputation for bringing missing
children safely home. Launched to tabloid stardom when he apprehended a
brutal serial killer named Gerald Reasoner, Petrov has become something of a
celebrity. When a woman approaches him, begging him to use his unique gifts
to find her missing daughter, Petrov's instincts sound an alarm. He senses
that she's concealing something. But is she lying to get Petrov's help or to
set him up? Three days later, just as he has amassed all the answers he
needs to close the case, they are swept away into oblivion.
Petrov awakes in a hospital bed, his memory of the past two weeks a
complete blank, his personality altered. He is tempted to just put the
trauma behind him and move on with his life, but there are too many things
holding him back. When he returns home, he discovers a photograph full of
strangers. In his office is a greeting card with a cryptic message inside,
both the receiver and the sender completely unknown. His bank account has
been augmented by a $450 check from a woman he can't remember. All of it
points to a case he cannot recall.
Digging for answers when he doesn't even know the questions, Petrov
begins to fear he is searching for the most elusive quarry he has ever
hunted: himself. Uncomfortable truths about his past rise up from this
haunting investigation, truths that force him to reinterpret the events of
the notorious Reasoner case from years before. But the closer Petrov comes
to solving the mystery, the more likely it seems that the monster he's
looking for is staring back at him in the mirror.
Chapter One
Lost Weekend
Nick Petrov, in the witness box, waited for the next question. The lawyer for
the accused looked up from his yellow pad and fastened his skeptical gaze --
familiar to millions of cable talk show viewers -- on Petrov's face. The lawyer
had eyebrows like Einstein's, resembled him in general, Petrov thought, but with
a better haircut. Perfume from the previous witness still hung in the air.
"Been quite the career," said the lawyer, "hasn't it, Mr. Petrov? So far."
A better haircut and a meaner disposition. "That's not for me to say," Petrov
said. He'd been on the stand for twenty-eight minutes, long enough to have
formed the opinion that there was only one juror to worry about -- the
middle-aged woman in the back row, a lapis butterfly brooch on her lapel. The
eleven other faces said guilty in the first degree, at least to him; but her
face, soft, pretty, unadorned, had mercy written all ...
As Joyce Carol Oates so eloquently puts it, "Oblivion immerses us in Petrov's assailed consciousness as he navigates his way through a Dali landscape of baffling clues, memory lapses, and visual hallucinations.."..continued
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Joyce Carol Oates
Neurological impairment is something we're all too likely to know firsthand, and Peter Abrahams's suspense novel Oblivion makes of this condition something rich and strange: an investigation into "lost time, like some dark forest in a fairy tale."Abraham's first book, The Fury of Rachel Monette, was published in 1980;
since then he has published a further 15 adult novels and, last year, his first
novel for teens,
Down The Rabbit Hole, the first in the Echo Falls Mystery series.
Although all his books fall broadly into the thriller category, to pigeonhole
him as simply a writer of thrillers is too simplistic. For a bibliography of his books see
BookBrowse. His latest novel for adults, End of Story, was
published in hardcover earlier this month, and the second in his Echo Falls
Mystery, Behind The Curtain, series will be published next week.
When asked which authors have most influences him he cites Vladimir Nabokov,
Graham Greene and Dostoevsky...
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