Wild Card

It is difficult to say whether this first novel's sluggishness originates with the translator (from Catalan) or the author, but this story of a supermarket cashier who stages an audacious robbery is drained of charm. Rossi Olivan thinks her job in Andorra (a tiny county on the border between Spain and France) is going nowhere, but when she realizes that her officious and sleazy manager, Jaume Coll, is embezzling from the business, she spots an opportunity for herself: stealing money the boss can't report missing. Rossi hatches a scheme involving her sister Mari who lives in Barcelona and who is to pick up the money from Jaume's office and get it into Spain by running it through a bank. Although Mari sees that Rossi's plan was developed with more enthusiasm than precision, she joins her sister in this dangerous game. McIntosh's notes on Andorra, a tourist Mecca, offer little more than can be gleaned from a gazetteer. Readers are on their own to figure out, for example, the dollar value of the money stolen (given in millions of pessetes) and the fact that the ``solitaire'' enjoyed by the narrator (as the title indicates, cards are a motif here) is less a game than a kind of tarot reading. (Nov.)