NIGHT AND ITS LONGINGS

A man searches for his ex-lover after she mysteriously disappears in Cioffari’s mystery novel.

In New York City in 1995, a man shows up on mystery writer Jake Garrett’s doorstep. He is Norm Davison, the husband of Jake’s ex-lover, Vera. Vera has disappeared, and Davison thinks Jake can help solve the puzzle. Vera was the great love of Jake’s life, so he agrees to help find her. The clues point in many different directions: Vera’s 9-year-old son died recently, and she fell apart after his death, but she seemed better recently; a perusal of Vera’s journals indicates she was looking to move across the country. Jake talks to Vera’s friends and a police contact in search of more information and attempts to identify what Vera referred to in her journals as the “Blue Flower” (this novel’s Rosebud). There’s some evidence to suggest that Vera used, or at least came into contact with, an illicit drug. Things start to go south as Jake is set up, threatened, and assaulted in the course of his search, which seems to confirm that Vera didn’t simply walk away from her life and that something more sinister is going on. So where is Vera? Nowhere near where Jake expects, and no one who might know where she is proves trustworthy. The narrative is both fast-paced and contemplative; Jake spends a lot of time mulling over what things mean (“She’s a distant memory. A stranger. Who was I kidding? She was the dead center of my sorrow”) and replays conversations he had with Vera when they were together in his mind. A lot of the novel takes place at night, and the story has a dreamlike quality. Jake constantly questions whether he’s experiencing something real or dreaming—sometimes to a degree that distracts from the central mystery. This is also a very New York novel, in a great way; Jake’s search takes him all over the city as he continues to encounter dead ends and red herrings, keeping readers on their toes.

A tightly wound missing person mystery.