SIEGE OF COMEDIANS

A century-spanning murder mystery that focuses more on the identities of the victims than the killers.

Iridia is a forensic sculptor in Brooklyn working for the Missing Persons bureau. Her job is to reconstruct the faces of unidentified skeletal remains in order to help identify them. The functionally orphaned child of two imprisoned, weed-growing anarchists, Iridia is used to a life of isolation, but when a seemingly innocuous cold case lands in her lap, she's drawn into a conspiracy involving arson, murder, exotic animal smuggling, and, eventually, threats on her life. In a bid to disappear as permanently as the still anonymous owners of the skulls in her studio, Iridia winds up in Vienna, where she attempts to lie low even as she's drawn back into the web of her old profession. Meanwhile, Martin Shusterman just keeps showing up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Originally from suburban New York, he forges a somewhat aimless cello career that eventually takes him to Buenos Aires, where he lives with his girlfriend, Abril, until she is disappeared, an incidental casualty in Argentina’s Dirty War. Shusterman returns to New York but remains obsessed with his former Buenos Aires neighbor Karl Sauer, a former Nazi propagandist filmmaker in hiding. Shusterman’s search for Sauer brings him to Vienna, where Sauer made his films in the 1930s and '40s. Using information from the septuagenarian daughter of one of Sauer’s leading men, Shusterman is led to the ruins of 39 Nachtfalterallee, the site of Sauer’s former offices, where a much older mystery is being unearthed. On the same site, Unna was the proprietress of a brothel in the last decades of the 1600s. Hardworking and pragmatic, she managed to survive the Ottoman siege and an outbreak of the plague while running a successful house of ill-repute. As the city suffers under the ravages of disease, poverty, and the pressing needs of refugees driven in front of the Ottoman army, Unna’s position becomes ever more tenuous. Iridia’s, Shusterman’s, and Unna’s stories—along with those of a myriad of other characters representative of the sideshows, genocides, and passing obsessions of the last five centuries or so—wind together along the slenderest spindles of happenstance, implausibly but definitively connecting through the ephemera of the objects (and skulls) they leave behind. By the final pages, the reader is simultaneously exhausted by the rigors of exposition-heavy prose and invigorated by the intellectual ambition of the author’s takes on death, time, history, and everything in between.

An ambitious novel written in sometimes overly ambitious prose, this book charms, intrigues, and bewilders.