Paris Twilight

Rymer is a writer of long-form nonfiction and his first novel has good bones; there’s plenty of mystery and tension to carry a reader through some overwritten passages. After a professional disgrace, prominent anesthesiologist Matilde Anselm comes to 1990 Paris as part of a surgical team that will perform a heart transplant on an unknown patient as soon as a donor heart becomes available. Suspecting that the heart will be obtained unethically, she begins a dialogue with Emil Sahran, a powerful diplomat coordinating the operation, and a romance quickly develops between the two. Meanwhile, Matilde learns that a stranger, Frenchman Byron Saxe, has inexplicably left his modest estate to her. Exploring his tiny apartment during her days spent waiting for a heart, she meets a young woman, Corie, who lives next door. Corie is a pianist, translator, and activist protesting the first Gulf War, and the two develop a shared fascination with a series of letters Byron had hired Corie to translate, written by a woman named Alba in the ’30s to her lover during the Spanish Civil War, which prove to be connected to Matilde’s own past. Early on, Matilde is offputtingly long-winded and the relationship with Sahran feels forced, but as the plot gathers momentum, its discoveries have real emotional pull. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency. (July)