Nothing That Is Ours by D.J. PalladinoReviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A murder mystery set in Santa Barbara in 1958. The only words in that sentence that don't excite me are A, set, in, and in. So I knew this was going to be a good read!
D.J. Palladino's So Cal noir crime novel is so much more than the hardboiled detective fiction it's modeled after. It includes the brilliant mind of Aldous Huxley and his drugs with Dennis Hopper tagging along and doing his Apocalypse Now character. Frank Lloyd Wright grumbles on to the scene at one point. There's also incest, local politics, secret government projects, and an underwater fantasy world. And the scary thing is that much of this is based upon fact!
Our hero is a newspaper man, who comes from an influential well-to-do Santa Barbara family. He's also made his own bones with a successful work of fiction, which is interspersed throughout Nothing That Is Ours. A novel within a novel as they say. Anyhow, said hero has to -just has to- figure the whos and whys of a body that washed up on shore with some rather peculiar wounds. He also has to deal with his insatiable attraction to his cousin.
This is a very clever book that often revolves around intellectuals bandying witty gibes. It's not your typical whodunnit. Nonetheless, I was so intrigued by it all that Palladino held me until the very end, because hell, I wanted to know who dunnit!
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