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Summary
Summary
Nine years after his last critically acclaimed thriller, The Finder , Colin Harrison returns with You Belong to Me . Filled with compelling characters and a loving but biting satire of New York City, You Belong to Me is an exceptional novel, and Colin Harrison is at the top of his game.
YOU BELONG TO ME . . .
Paul Reeves is a successful immigration lawyer, but his passion is collecting old New York City maps, tangible records of the city where he's spent his life. One afternoon he attends an auction with his neighbor Jennifer Mehraz, the beautiful young wife of an Iranian-American financier-lawyer. Suddenly, a handsome man in fatigues appears and whisks Jennifer away.
YOU BELONG TO ME . . .
A long-lost lover from Jennifer's rural Pennsylvania past, the man sets a series of alarming events in motion. Those close to Jennifer are desperate to figure out who he is and how the two are connected--especially her high-powered and possessive husband, whose ultimate goal is to make this embarrassing intrusion into his marriage disappear.
YOU BELONG TO ME . . .
At the same time, one of the world's rarest, most inaccessible maps suddenly goes on sale, but before Paul can finalize a deal, an anonymous buyer snatches it out from under his nose. Maddened and perplexed by the loss, Paul must find out who beat him to it and how to get the map for himself.
Author Notes
Colin Harrison is the author of the novels You Belong to Me, Break and Enter , Bodies Electric , Manhattan Nocturne , Afterburn , T he Havana Room , The Finder , and Risk . He serves as the editor in chief at Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. A graduate of Haverford College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, he is married to the writer Kathryn Harrison and lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Jamesport, Long Island.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In his latest New York-centered crime thriller, Harrison (Manhattan Nocturne) spins a tightly wound tale of obsession and betrayal. When middle-aged immigration attorney and New York City map connoisseur Paul Reeves attends an auction with his beautiful neighbor, both are confronted by mysterious figures who will dramatically alter the course of their futures. Losing an auction at the last second to an unknown bidder, Paul becomes fixated on obtaining a rare, highly desired map-regardless of cost or the dubiously moral actions required to complete its acquisition. Meanwhile, small-town-girl-turned-trophy-wife Jennifer Mehraz reignites a passionate romance from her past after a man in military fatigues appears at the auction, risking potentially violent repercussions from her wealthy husband if he discovers her infidelity. An attempted abduction results in two unforeseen deaths, which send carefully crafted plans spiraling out of control. As bodies pile up and Jennifer's fear for her safety reaches a crescendo, Paul attempts to help his friend while advancing his own interests. The narrative is as impressively constructed as the maps in Paul's collection: each section laid out in seamless order to allow for a satisfyingly neat conclusion. What the narrative has in plotting it lacks in characterization, often relying on overused noir conventions-particularly with regards to women-which ultimately allows the city itself to emerge as the most memorable character. New York, in its glory and historical complexity, defies any who would attempt to possess it and dwarfs the ambitions of this intricate cast of ruthless characters. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Paul Reeves, elite immigration attorney and obsessive collector of antique New York City maps, is drawn into a swiftly escalating series of murders when he invites a neighbor, Jennifer Mehraz, to accompany him to the auction of his latest map quarry. To their surprise, Jennifer's first love, Bill, appears at the auction determined to win Jennifer back. It would be a heartwarming love story if Jennifer weren't already married to cunning financial strategist Ahmed Mehraz. As a favor to Jennifer, Paul allows her old flame to stay in his empty childhood home in hopes of keeping the couple's deepening involvement from Ahmed, whom he has never liked. Then Bill is attacked by hit men who don't make it out of the job alive, and Bill and Jennifer become the target of a plot that revives ghosts of Iran's revolution, mobilizes cartel hit men, and jolts Paul from his contented map-hunting routines. Harrison's (Risk, 2009) ostensibly straightforward fable of obsession and manipulation becomes twisted as Paul's plot to hold Ahmed accountable reaps unexpected rewards.--Tran, Christine Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
LATE INTO COLIN HARRISON'S noirish new novel, "You Belong to Me," Paul Reeves, a prosperous 50-year-old immigration lawyer, sits in the storied Grand Central Oyster Bar, missing his father. "This doesn't look like a church," he recalls his father telling him when Paul was a boy. "But it is." Decades later he surveys the familiar dark wood, the "ancient" waiters, the swordfish he and his father had seen still mounted over the bar. "You had to have places in the city like that," he decides, "or you didn't know who you were anymore." Is Paul longing for a simpler, more communal era when, as his father says, people could go to a bar and "feel like they are part of things"? Or is this the bleary nostalgia of certain white-men-of-comfort in a city always in flux? Both, it seems. Longing for a lost authenticity mingles with a deeper, less articulated fear of displacement and obsolescence. We hear echoes here of another noir hero, Raymond Chandler's detective Philip Marlowe, who is forever mourning a bygone Los Angeles - once "a big dry sunny place ... good-hearted and peaceful," as Chandler put it, but now given over to harsh neon, "fast-dollar boys" and a smug suburbia. Marlowe belongs nowhere. Noir has always had a complicated relationship with nostalgia, alternately rejecting the past as a psychological prison and romanticizing it as the lost Eden that predated our fallen present. At its heart, however, the hard, hungry gaze of noir has always been fixed instead on the future. It's a genre filled with the kind of characters the novelist Laura Lippman calls "dreamers who become schemers." The dedicated employee who decides to steal from the boss, the drifter who wants the rich man's wife, the low-rent crooks who try to pull off the big con. Harrison loves his schemers, especially the high-stakes New York City variety, and his exuberance for plundering financiers, money-grubbing heirs and double-dealing musclemen for hire is the fuel that propels "You Belong to Me." At the center is Paul, whose comfortable lifestyle comes from his boutique law practice but whose passion lies in obsessive rare map collecting. In the novel's opening scene, Paul attends a map auction with his neighbor Jennifer, the fetching young wife of Ahmed Mehraz, a fast-rising lawyerfinancier from a wealthy West Coast Iranian-American family. Mid-auction marks the sudden, dramatic appearance of William Wilkerson, a recently discharged Army Ranger and former lover from Jennifer's hardscrabble past. It's a classic noir triangle, but it widens quickly to introduce a roundelay of characters with volatile tempers and conflicting agendas, including Paul's sometime girlfriend Rachel, Ahmed's worldly uncle Hassan, Wilkerson's God-fearing Texan father, sundry contract killers and map dealers - even a former Mexican cartel assassin hiding from El Chapo. The common denominator among them seems to be a voracious hunger: for money, power, revenge, a baby, a bargaining chip, a return to a more glorious past - or, in Paul's case, for a very old map. "Wish and dream," Paul philosophizes at one point, standing among his maps. "Trouble and desire." The story that follows is deliciously twisty and, intermittently, startlingly violent. With such a wide cast, its many characters risk feeling like types, or even stereotypes, but Harrison attempts to give most of them a moment in the sun: an explanatory back story, a convincing moral justification, even a Rosebud moment. "Everyone had a private journey," Paul observes, "and no one was ever completely known by anyone." Some journeys, however, are more compelling than others; "You Belong to Me" is weakest when ventriloquizing its primary female characters, with Rachel and Jennifer never fully coming to life - and seldom driving any of the real action. But Harrison's interests are never entirely with the novel's younger characters anyway. Instead, the emotional and moral heft of the story resides with its older men: Uncle Hassan, whose role in Iran's tumultuous history has imbued him with a moral gravitas; Mr. Wilkerson, the Army Ranger's father, who fairly glows with "Friday Night Lights"-style grace; and, ultimately, Paul himself. "No one," Hassan ruminates at one point in the action, "is interested in the opinions of an old man ... sitting next to a pool in California." He adds, "History moved on, left you at the station holding a heavy suitcase and a worthless ticket." But within the moral universe of "You Belong to Me," these three men of middle age - a father, a father figure and (if Paul's girlfriend has her way) a father-tobe - exert a powerful force. "When you never know your father," Jennifer speculates as her life unravels, "it causes all kinds of trouble." It's a view Paul, and Harrison's narrative, support. The novel's older men, these canny patriarchs, seem to understand everything the younger characters do not. If the hot passions of youth - desire, jealousy, foolish pride - fail to cool into something softer, more measured, then the catastrophe looms. It is up to these wise men to set things right, and Paul in particular succeeds in engineering, in the novel's last pages, a dizzying series of machinations to institute an order on the disorder he sees, moving characters around likes pawns on a chess board. Or like push pins on a map. Maps, as Paul tells us, seek to fix in place what can never be fixed. They attempt to stop time and assert a false permanence. And what rescues the ending of "You Belong to Me" from what might feel like too tidy a conclusion is the messiness that is Paul, the dreamer-schemer. Early in the novel, Paul admits to dreaming of owning every map ever made of New York City. To do so, he feels, would give him a godlike power - a power even to destroy, if he so chooses. "For the collector collects to have. To own, to worship, to possess - to say this is mine and no one else's." This is the essence of noir, this unstoppable urge, this voracity so intense it starts to feel perverse even to the subject. It is irresistible to note a very similar passage in Harrison's recent account of his own obsessive map collecting in "Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York." With exquisite unrepentance, he notes that his Brooklyn brownstone is covered in thousands of maps and he, like Paul, longs to own every one of New York City. "I crave them, I fever for them. I feel that a map I do not have but want is yet rightfully mine; I must touch them and smell them and possess them, must run my finger along their stiff or soft or irregular damaged edges." This is the obsession that we see in Paul and that thrums deliriously through the novel. He wants them all. He can't stop, and doesn't want to. It's consuming. The hard, hot beat of noir goes on. Hunger unites these characters: for money, power, revenge, a baby or a return to a more glorious past. MEGAN ABBOTT'S latest novel, "You Will Know Me," is available in paperback.
Kirkus Review
Gritty whodunit by thriller-meister Harrison (Risk, 2009, etc.), the bard of Gotham mayhem.Map collectors are mild-mannered nerds, right? Maybe, unless, like the typophiles of William Hallahan's long-out-of-print 1973 mystery, The Ross Forgery, they conceal a rough edge. So it is with Paul Reeves, an immigration attorney"a mere immigration attorney," one character ruefully thinks, late into the proceedingswho is not in the least bit shy of chucking aside professional ethics to get what he wants. One of the things he wants is a fabulously rare, fabulously expensive, utterly idiosyncratic map of 19th-century Manhattan. How does a mere immigration attorney secure the bread for such a goodie? Well, therein hangs Harrison's tale, which involves an Iranian-American entrepreneur, his trailer-park-come-to-the-big-city wife ("The more beautiful the girls," thinks Reeves, "the more volatile their destinies"), and a strapping soldier who, fatigue-clad, interrupts a well-heeled auction to whisk said young woman away. "I know I seem like some crazy motherfucker cowboy who doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground," says the perp to Paul, "but it's a lot more complicated than that, mister." So it is. The kidnapping, its victim not in the least unwilling, sets in motion an elaborate story with many moving parts, some of them involving large piles of money, hit men of a decidedly murderous bent, wealthy expats and players from shadowy sultanates, map thieves, drug dealers and crackheads, and an assortment of other people you probably wouldn't want to know. When the body count starts to rise, it's up to Paul to save his skin while trying to figure out how to grab the object of his dreams, to say nothing of luscious Jennifer Mehraz. Harrison's story moves nimbly across a populous, MacGuffin-strewn landscape, and though it doesn't paint a nice picture of rural America, it doesn't spare the worst of New York, either.For fans of the Larsson/Ludlum flavor of action-packed, cynical thriller, where no good deed goes unpunished. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Jennifer, blond and beautiful, has made a life for herself in New York City. Being married to a rich man and hobnobbing with the wealthy are a far cry from her humble country upbringing. When a past love suddenly appears, he threatens to overturn her nicely ordered existence. When Jennifer turns for help to her neighbor Paul Reeves, an immigration lawyer and avid map collector, he is pulled into a web of deceit and secrets. Harrison's (Risk; The Finder) eagerly awaited new thriller starts out strong but, unfortunately, leaves readers flat. Jennifer's story is unoriginal, and her husband, Ahmed, is a stereotype of the affluent Middle Easterner. The subplot of Paul's hang-on girlfriend trying to trap him by getting pregnant is insulting to women. The pace is rather slow, and none of the characters, except Paul, are likable or stand out. Harrison would have been more successful if he focused on Paul, possibly starting a series with him as the main character. Verdict A lackluster thriller that is forgotten as soon as it is finished. [See Prepub Alert, 1/8/17.]-Marianne Fitzgerald, Severna Park H.S., MD © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
