Rocky Mountain News

May 14, 2004

MYSTERY
Fade to Clear
By Leonard Chang

Grade: A

Allen Choice is worried about everything - his career choice as a private investigator, his business partner, his increasingly serious relationship with a woman whose well-to-do parents don't approve of him. A San Francisco Gen-Xer, introspective, sensitive, Korean-American, Choice definitely isn't the typical tough guy P.I. with plenty of moxie.

Yet Leonard Chang has figured out how to draw this self-absorbed and slightly geeky character in a way that makes him and his story compelling. In fact, it's more than compelling - it's a page-turner.

Choice isn't sophisticated but approaches his career seriously. He's a nice guy, alone in the world, competent at his job, who really isn't asking for much. He wants to focus on safe insurance and corporate investigations, but life intervenes when Choice's old girlfriend Linda, now engaged to someone else, hires him to find her niece, who has been kidnapped by her father in a bitter divorce.

The resulting investigation is gripping, terrifying and even sad. While pursuing Nora and her father, Choice studies Kierkegaard and searches for an ethical or moral structure for himself. He makes mistakes, things go terribly wrong and he suffers. Choice allows others to pull him in the wrong direction, with inevitably bad consequences. Sometimes this book is like one of those horror movies where you want to scream: "No! Don't open that door!"

But even when Choice is making bad decisions or contemplating the meaning of life, the book compels our attention with a terrific plot and pacing that make it hard to put down.

Chang gets kudos for taking the elements of a basic private-investigator mystery and turning them sideways, inside out and backward for a whole new take on the genre. This is an excellent book that deserves lots of readers.

--Jane Dickinson