THE HAVANA ROOM

Manly middle-age obsessions, including sex, restaurants, real estate, drugs, health, death, sports, fatherhood, and the law, combine agreeably in another intelligent thriller from the author of the 2000 Afterburn.

The very pleasant, very expensive Upper East Side world of decent but far from priggish lawyer Bill Wyeth disappears in a gulp when his son’s ten-year-old sleepover visitor’s lips touch a few molecules of peanut oil to which he’s violently allergic and he dies. Hounded, sued, and cuckolded by the late boy’s father, Wyeth loses his family and job, skidding with breathtaking speed into domestic and legal oblivion. His reemergence begins with the discovery of an old-line steakhouse, its cuisine so ancienne it’s cool, where he begins to take his meals. Daily. The restaurant is managed by the enormously competent and sexy Allison Sparks. Part of Allison’s allure is her well-guarded access to the Havana Room, a downstairs space featuring a mysterious show to which one must be invited. When Wyeth is at last admitted, his viewing pleasure is immediately complicated by an introduction to Jay Rainey, one of the men in Allison’s life, a man who has immediate need for a lawyer. Rainey is angling to swap his North Fork Long Island farm, land of huge potential, for an undistinguished Manhattan office building, and the contract must be signed by midnight. Smart enough to know trouble when he sees it, keen enough on exercising his skills to ignore the trouble, and subject to Rainey’s charisma, Wyeth works the deal and enters Rainey’s troubled, sad world. The very day of the deal an elderly black employee is found frozen to death at the controls of a backhoe on Rainey’s property. The victim’s understandably distressed family, whose numbers include a sadistic hip-hop club owner, seek recompense. The farm’s powerfully rich new owner seeks assurance that the backhoe was not burying any sins. Wyeth seeks answers, some of which are plied from Long Island’s grandest real-estate dame.

Plenty to like in Harrison’s specialty mix of immensely engaging characters in immensely extreme situations, including ingestion of psychotropic fish.