Robert Stone
Kem Nunn’s suspenseful and sinewy thriller demonstrates the mastery of psychological insight and cool observation his readers have learned to rely upon. Nunn’s characters range from pathological multiple personalities to a police detective bent more ways from sundown, all of them dangerous characters who would never for a moment let their professional or personal corruption interfere with murder, especially if it concerns an affair of the heart. That Dr. Eldon Chance, the tormented hero attempting to make his way through the chambered psyches of these lost souls is by profession a forensic psychiatrist makes for a deadly, absolutely satisfying storytelling. Chance is suspenseful contemporary crime fiction unrivaled in its intensity.
starred review Publisher’s Weekly
Brilliant and cerebral psychological thriller
Los Angeles Magazine
Lives spin out of control and rattle like pinballs through the greedy, self-destructive, violent backdrop of this American life.
Arizona Republic
The book could be considered a pulp masterpiece. It has everything from a femme fatale to a dystopian setting where the California sun is blotted out by a black-ash fog from wildfires burning around the Bay. Chance is the kind of everyman whose bad choices are noir staples. But calling it pulp would undersell the sheer genius of the writing, which uses the convention of mystery-thrillers to create a psychological allegory of Freud’s construct, id, ego and superego at war with themselves.
Los Angeles Times
Is it too much to compare Kem Nunn to Raymond Chandler? Like Chandler, Nunn’s great subject is what lies beneath the surface, the desolation that infuses us at every turn. . . The power of this disturbing and provocative novel is that it leaves us unmoored among the signposts of a morally ambiguous universe in which, even after we have finished reading, it is uncertain who has been feeding whom.
San Francisco Chronicle - Alan Cheuse
"Sentence by sentence Nunn achieves a muscular eloquence - I almost wrote elegance - unusual in what at first appears to be a genre novel. There hasn't been fiction this good about a San Francisco medical professional gone off the rails over a woman since Frank Norris' deluded dentist in the 1899 novel 'McTeague.'"
New York Times Book Review
"Chance takes place in the twilit world of noir, where people and things are never what they seem…For all the mayhem - its ending is delicately funny."
MAY 2014 - AudioFile
Listeners will find San Francisco as much a character in Nunn’s sinewy, gritty thriller as psychiatrist Eldon Chance. After a nasty divorce, Dr. Chance finds himself drawn to a patient, Jaclyn Blackstone, who is suffering from dissociative identity disorder. Adam Verner portrays the characters entering Chance’s new life, as well as his ex-wife and daughter, with empathy, finding a unique style and voice for each. Listeners will find it completely credible that “D,” an imposing ex-soldier, understands the mindset of abusive predators like Jaclyn’s husband. Verner intensifies the drama, suspense, and plot twists with his subtle presentation of Nunn’s flawed but engaging characters. Contemporary crime fiction at its best. S.C.A. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
