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The air of dreamlike menace that hovers over Trick of Light (Putnam, $24.95), David Hunt's second thriller (after The Magician's Tale ), transforms San Francisco from a daytime city of brilliant color and clarity into an eerie nether world "enveloped in fog, swaddled in mystery and mist." This enigmatic aura comes filtered through the perspective of the narrator, a profoundly color-blind photographer named Kay Farrow, who sees subtlety and shadow and infinite gradations of truth where others see only the blinding hues of reality. "Night's my time," Kay tells us, the time when her light-sensitive eyes can focus on the negative images that absorb her imagination.
The death of Kay's beloved mentor in a fishy hit-and-run accident takes her to the seedy Mission District, where the older woman was working in secret on a project involving naked women and men in suits. Caught by the feeling of ""menace, depravity, even evil" in the murky photographs her teacher left behind, Kay searches for their "implicate order-that which is implicit yet hidden from view." Following her own vision (and nudged on by Hunt's hypnotic prose), Kay conducts an investigation that goes down some very dark alleys and leads to some very bleak truths. But in the inverted imagery of this strange world, the blacker it gets, the lovelier it looks. - Marilyn Stasio |
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