The Drowned Detective

Jordan, writer and filmmaker (The Crying Game), returns to his favorite theme—that of a missing woman—in this curious new novel. Jonathan is a detective who works for a tracing agency. When he is asked to locate Petra, the missing daughter of a rural couple in an unnamed Eastern European city, he enlists the help of Gertrude, a psychic whose Pomeranian has a luxated patella. She burns a map to guide Jonathan to Petra’s whereabouts, but the mystery of the missing woman soon becomes secondary to Jonathan’s relationship with an unnamed cellist he saves after she jumps off a bridge. Intrigued by her sad beauty, he visits her repeatedly. Are the two women connected? Jordan teases out the answer as Jonathan grapples with the infidelity of his wife, Sarah, while protests and ghosts lurk in the background. As the story unspools, Jordan shows his strengths as a writer in the terrific dialogue and atmospheric imagery. However, what starts out as spellbinding soon becomes underwhelming, never fully delivering on the strong set-up. (May)