Nothing That Is Ours

Set in California in 1958, Palladino’s uneven debut mystery gets off to a strong start before faltering. Trevor Westin, a writer from a powerful family whose success at a young age has made him a celebrity, is now a journalist for the Los Angeles Times. A report over the police radio channel sends him to Santa Barbara, where the corpse of an unidentified man has washed up against the city’s breakwater. The man has been shot once in each hand and foot, and once in the side, as if crucified by bullets. What follows doesn’t do justice to this intriguing setup. In his pursuit of answers about the victim and his killer, Trevor encounters celebrities such as author Aldous Huxley and actor Vincent Price, but these episodes do little to further the plot; extracts from a novel about a young man’s encounters with an underwater civilization are likewise extraneous. Occasional lapses into ponderous prose are a further drawback (“I remember the sleek body solely as an object of meaning, a gray thing engendered by the overcast skies”). Still, incidentals like observations about flaws in Darwin’s theory of natural selection may be of interest to some readers, and Palladino successfully brings to life the Santa Barbara of another era. [em](June) [/em]