Hardcover

Adult Fiction

Pub Date: Mar 1, 2010

One hangover-headache morning, Ig Perrish gropes his forehead and discovers a pair of knobby, pointed protuberances. As he proceeds to stumble through the day, person after person he encounters, including the nurse and doctor he consults about the horns, tell him things about their desires and intentions that they should keep to themselves, and whenever he touches someone, he instantly knows their darkest secrets. Most disconcerting, he finds out that virtually everyone thinks that, lack of evidence notwithstanding, he really did sexually assault and murder his lover since high school, Merrin Williams, almost exactly a year ago. Only his brother, Terry, a TV talk-show star, doesnt, but that, Ig learns through his special powers, is because Terry knows Merrin was killed by someone near and dear to her and Ig both. Ig determines on making the culprit die as painfully as Merrin died. Hills a terrific descriptive writer, and realistic dialogue comes easily to him, but those skills dont help this diffuse revenge caper move as crisply as it ought to, and they dont compensate for the cookie-cutter sameness of its characters. Except for Ig and the Merrin, everyone in Igs little world is a covert creep seething with mean spirits; although hes becoming steadily more demonic, Ig himself is the nicest guy around. Worst, the big-showdown climax comes off as splatter-movie farcical after the longueurs of the preceding 300-plus pages.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)