In Malice, Quite Close

by Brandi Lynn Ryder Narrated by Michael Kramer

Overview

French ex-pat Tristan Mourault is the wealthy, urbane heir to a world-renowned collection of art - and an insatiable voyeur enamored with Karen Miller, a fifteen-year-old from a working-class family in San Francisco. Deciding he must 'rescue' Karen from her unhappy circumstances, Tristan kidnaps her and stages her death to mask his true crime. Years later, Karen is now Gisele and the pair lead an opulent life in idyllic and rarefied Devon, Washington. But when Nicola, Gisele's young daughter, stumbles upon a secret cache of paintings - all nudes of Gisele - Tristan's carefully constructed world begins to crumble. As Nicola grapples with the tragedy that follows, she crosses paths with Amanda Miller, who comes to Devon to investigate the portraits' uncanny resemblance to her long-lost sister. Set against a byzantine backdrop of greed, artifice, and dangerous manipulations, this is an intoxicating debut that keeps its darkest secrets until the very last page.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Told in turns by nearly all of its sexy, artistic, and obsessive characters, this byzantine debut stretches narrative to the breaking point. Tristan Mourault III, a rich, French Humbert Humbert-figure, becomes desperately infatuated with a middle-class American teen named Karen Miller, and the two fake her death and run off, with her posing as his daughter, Gisele; after a time living together in New York, they move to an artists' colony in Devon, Wash., at the invitation of the charismatic artist Robin Dresden. Gisele marries Luke Farrell, merely a pawn in Tristan's game, and has a beautiful daughter, Nicola. Of course, before long, Gisele wants out of her cage, so she takes other lovers and, through a series of convenient coincidences that involve blackmail and murder, Gisele's past re-emerges, and her long-lost sister, Amanda, now living in Seattle, happens to have some impossibly close and fraught connections with Tristan's milieu. The narrative winds itself into hysterical knots as revelations and twists pile up, sometimes more than a bit implausibly. Though Ryder gets credit for audacious puzzle building, the plot is more exhausting than enlightening; indeed, though it's a page-turner, it doesn't reach the dizzying literary heights it reaches for. (Aug.)

From the Publisher

"...sexy, artistic...a page-turner." - Publishers Weekly

"A modern gothic that emits a creepy glow..." - Kirkus Reviews

"...[an] accomplished and darkly sensuous debut...unlike anything else you will read this summer...a triumph. Ryder's writing is as gorgeous...The novel's many mysteries unfold carefully and beautifully, and readers will be trying to connect the dots until the very last page." - BookPage

Kirkus Reviews

Creepy doings in Washington State, where a vulnerable 15-year-old girl kidnapped by a twisted French expatriate in San Francisco painfully comes of age, and where, years later, her younger sister looks for answers to her disappearance.

Ryder's first novel is basically a vampire saga with snooty art collectors and forgers substituting for the vampires. The protagonist is wealthy Tristan Mourault, a collector of females who woos young Karen Miller through a series of "accidental" encounters and convinces her to escape from her abusive family. After drugging her, he uses her blood to leave fake traces of her death, renames her Gisele after his late wife and, posing as her father, gives her a whirlwind tour of New York. With a narrative leap of 15 years, the book moves to Washington and introduces us to her beautiful and inquisitive daughter Nicola, who thinks Tristan is her Grand-père and Gisele's haunted husband Luke is her father. The plot centers on a secret series of nude paintings of Gisele, whose sexual awakening arrives the same time as Tristan's impotence. Secrets are revealed, covers are blown and Gisele mysteriously drowns. Who did her in? Plotting not being Ryder's strong suit, you may not care. The novel, which takes its title from a Rimbaud poem, gets off to a beguiling start with its nicely subdued sense of menace and dark intrigue. But it fails to build in intensity, relies too much on contrivances to stay afloat, and the characters are disappointingly superficial.

A modern gothic that emits a creepy glow in establishing itself but reveals the unsteady hand of a first-time novelist as the story unfolds.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940175575812
Publisher:	Dreamscape Media
Publication date:	08/23/2011
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Growing up, my heroes were all madmen of a sort. Madness, my mother said, defined great men, just as fear defined weak ones. It seemed wise to adopt her opinion. My ancestors range from the visionary to the criminal and I am named for a good many of them. (Tristan Leandre Jourdain Mourault III.) My surname is a dignified one in my native land, translating roughly to ‘little dark.’ I’ve always thought of this as dusk, just before night and beyond the normalcy of day. It is where we have always existed.

My obsession with beauty began in infancy. I was mesmerized by pictures, by flowers and faces, by that lovely symmetry which even the undiscriminating eye terms beautiful. Though Papa was heir to a fortune in Impressionist art, Maman was the true aesthete. I often think of the Mourault Collection as hers alone. She took the paintings like lovers and knew all their stories: the gentle arthritic Renoir, the tempers of Degas, the humiliations of Lautrec and infidelities of Monet. She wove wondrous tales around them, audacious and certainly fictive. Maman knew that the power of a painting, of any beautiful thing, is not in itself but in its afterlife. Not the thing of a moment, but a perpetual quest.

My own quests began with the lovely Yvette Desmarais at the age of five. At my birthday party, I cornered her in the garden. Never was there a more satisfying game of cache-cache, or as you say, Hide and Seek. Those wide eyes, the color of ice on a gray day, and the lines of her bow-tie mouth. She began to scream, yet in later years took to writing me love letters. The paradox was instructive.

Later, I exercised more discretion but took great delight in spying upon one of our maids, Martine, at her bath. I did so guiltlessly; it was not so very different from gazing upon the creamy flesh of Renoir’s nudes. Only I preferred my art living.

I hesitate to say I was sex-obsessed. I had not so much an unquenchable appetite as an exacting one and as such, my cosseted world soon grew confining. I elected to spend summers with relatives in Brussels, Edinburgh and Munich. My seasons had new names: Jennifer, Adela, Genevieve, Anna. With conscious deliberation I collected women, yet they were not conquests; they were studies. I soaked in their scent, memorized their outlines, colored them in. Nothing approached the ideal of my vision. And so I sought visions everywhere, following them to their end. And then one came that did not end.

I called her Gisèle.

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