(Ace, 1991)
Reviewed by Jim Henry
I picked this one up because of the quotation page, which has bits from John Ruskin, G. K. Chesterton, and Edward Lear; and I'm very glad that I did so.
The hero is going up to northern California to pick up an old drawing which has been offered on loan to the museum he works at. When he gets there, he finds the owner missing, apparently dead, and the sketch gone. There are a lot of other people who want to find it for various reasons of their own.
The story starts out slow and seemingly aimless, but the fascinating characters carry it along until the plot takes shape. The characters are most of them people I would travel a long way to meet... Or, in the case of the villains, travel an even longer way to avoid meeting. For example, Roy Barton (the hero's uncle), enjoying life greatly and ready to risk his life for his friends, and enjoying money when he has it without killing himself trying to get more and more and more of it. His plans for neat ways to make money remind me of a boy breathlessly telling his mom about the lemonade stand he is going to run. Or Heloise Lamey, miserly, power-hungry, nearly dead ("dried-up", like the wicked witches of Oz), and very terrifying.
The story develops what happens when the sketch is folded into an origami cup, what the sketch is and why so many people want it, and what it has to do with John Ruskin's bones and Humpty-Dumpty.
A James P. Blaylock
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