MINE ALL MINE

A high-strung sentry meets his match in this witty comedy about love, possession and the uncertainty of security.

Barring the overly elaborate but forgivable confluence of double-crosses at its gasping finale, Davies’s latest comic novel (Goodbye Lemon, 2006, etc.) succeeds admirably. Our loquacious narrator is Otto Starks, a highly specialized security agent known as a “pulse”—a human sentinel with otherworldly powers of perception honed by years of training and a plethora of pharmacological abuse incurred in the interests of toxin immunity. “To say that we are elite security guards doesn’t quite cover it,” Otto explains. “We are the reason why the Crown Jewels still belong to Great Britain and why warheads haven’t shown up in Iran.” Blessed with the love of struggling art-history professor Charlie Izzo, who thinks he’s a talent scout for the Mets, Starks is circling around a few more high-paying gigs before he plans to slip away with Charlie in tow on an expensive sloop. Putting a monkey wrench in his plans is a preternaturally gifted art thief dubbed the “Rat Burglar,” who revels not only in outmaneuvering the hypersensitive guard, but in leaving him alive each time to suffer the ridicule of his equally quirky comrades. Davies brilliantly imagines the elaborate details of guarding treasures that Otto thinks of merely as “MacGuffins,” from the bantering shorthand of his fraternity of muscle-bound custodians to the action-packed brawls between Starks and opponents armed with dart guns. As the plot intensifies toward a showdown among Otto, his elusive nemesis and a vicious underworld puppeteer named Azar over a stolen cache of misappropriated Iraqi art, Davies’s latest starts to resemble a comic book more than a crime novel. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Frenetic and clever: does for lonesome security guards what John Welter’s Night of the Avenging Blowfish (1994) did for the U.S. Secret Service.