SEVEN TIMES DEAD

An American salesman vacationing in France is mistaken for someone else and accused of murder in Chaney’s thriller.

Richard Slade is a 43-year-old pesticide salesman from St. Louis, Missouri—or, as he memorably and melodramatically puts it, a “merchant of death.” In fact, his life is painfully drudging. He wrestles with the torpor of his “existential quandary,” even taking up poetry as a bulwark against his life’s banality. When Slade decides to take a short vacation to Nice to see an old friend named Septimus Morgan, he ends up with far more excitement than he bargained for in this taut drama. A mysterious woman accosts him at a bar, pointing a gun at him and forcing a flash drive into his coat pocket. Later, he is arrested by French police for her murder, and while being transported by them somewhere, the officers are shot by three masked gunmen who clearly mean to kill Richard as well. He manages to escape, only to find himself on the run from both French authorities and criminals about whom he knows nothing. The author magisterially exercises literary restraint—the reader is told enough to avoid exasperating bewilderment but is, like Richard, kept in a state of suspenseful confusion. Chaney’s prose is artfully terse and punchy—here, Richard struggles to come to grips with his painful predicament: “The only fitting end to the tale would be if I suddenly woke up in a psychiatric ward, shackled to a bed. That would have been the best of all possible worlds. To know that I had gone mad and the rest of the world was still reliably sane.” The plot is more than a touch convoluted, ultimately folding in the CIA, British intelligence, and terrorists looking to manufacture weapons-grade mustard gas. Somehow, though, it all feels plausible enough, and the author resists the urge to transform his protagonist into some sort of badass soldier-of-fortune. This is an engrossing tale, exciting and terrifying. Even as it becomes excessively labyrinthine, the work remains impressively intelligent.

An enthralling story, darkly thoughtful and convincing.