Manhattan nocturne

In this full-bore detective tale of scandal and mayhem in the Big Apple, Colin Harrison whips up noir for the 90s, complete with a jaded newspaperman protagonist, a mysterious femme fatale, exhaustive travelogues of the meat-grinder labyrinth of Manhattan, and an elusive jade figurine. Harrison weds a literary sensibility to this tangled tale, but the pleasures of the novel come mainly from the conventional elements of all detective fiction: the assembling of apparently disconnected pieces into a coherent puzzle.