My Darling Detective
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Jacob Rigoletâa soon-to-be former assistant to a wealthy art collectorâlooks up from his seat at an auction to see his mother, the former head librarian at the Halifax Free Library, walking almost casually up the aisle. Before a stunned audience, she flings an open jar of black ink at master photographer Robert Capaâs Death on a Leipzig Balcony. Whatâs more, Jacobâs police detective fiancÃĐe, Martha Crauchet, is assigned to the ensuing interrogation.
In My Darling Detective, Howard Norman delivers a fond nod to classic noir, as Jacobâs understanding of the man he has always assumed to be his father unravels against the darker truth of Robert Emil, a Halifax police officer suspected but never convicted of murdering two Jewish residents during the shocking upswing of anti-Semitism in 1945.
The denouement, involving a dire shootout and an emergency deliveryâthe second Rigolet to be born in the Halifax Free Libraryâis Norman at his provocative, uncannily moving best.
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Howard Norman is a three-time winner of National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a winner of the Lannan Award for fiction. His novels The Northern Lights and The Bird Artist were nominated for the National Book Award. His books have been translated into twelve languages. He divides his time between East Calais, Vermont, and Washington, DC.
Bronson Pinchot began talking at 9 months of age. Today, half a century later, he talks into a microphone in a soundproof booth for a living. In between, he attended Yale University as well as the acting programs at Shakespeare & Co. and Circle-in-the-Square, logged in well over 200 episodes of television, starred or costarred in a bouquet of films, plays, musicals, and Shakespeare on Broadway and in London, and developed a passion for Greek revival architecture.
