In 1949 Ronald Shepard, the son of servants to a millionaire playboy living on a private island off the coast of South Carolina, meets Marilyn Monroe. This begins the child's movement from innocence to the eventual experience that results in an obsession with sex, power, greed and ambition that shapes the rest of his life.

In 2001 seventeen-year-old Cassandra DeRoy has been employed in the world's oldest profession for three years. A dead ringer for Marilyn Monroe, Cassie stands at a street corner one night when Ronald spots her. Remembering his encounter with Marilyn so many years ago, Ronald picks her up and takes her home. He proves to be the gentlest man she'd ever met.

In 2018 sixteen-year-old Ginger Todd faces the ugliest elements of her society. Disgusted with her past, Ginger sees no hope of improvement for her future. Adopted to people who don't understand her, Ginger finds herself pregnant and seeking answers to her identity in the journals of her alcoholic mother. For a brief moment, she realizes she had actually been valued, that her existence had not always been an inconvenience and an annoyance.

Three narrative flows gracefully intertwine in a powerful novel about love, sex and power. Randall Silvis' fine storytelling mesmerizes the reader, combining wonder, comedy and crassness in an incredibly moving epic that confronts our deepest natures. Light and dark likewise intertwine resulting in a profound revelation of pain and redemption. These vibrant characters enact our greatest desires and our greatest fears, yet touch our hearts and imaginations in ways that are moving and profound. Very highly recommended.

Mysticus, the latest novel from Randall Silvis, invites us to look at ourselves through what we value. The plot is revealed in three separate narrative lines, all different time segments in the life of Ronald Shepard and each focusing on significant characters who make their ways into or out of Shepard's life. In braiding three different times as he does, Silvis lets us see how past, present and future are in a way contemporaneous. Because of what we have in common culturally, we are not so different from members of other generations. Perhaps the feeling that the twenty-first century isn't so stunningly different as we thought it would be is partly explained by the treatment of time and events in the book. Other reviewers of Mysticus agree that what Silvis does with language is reason enough to read the book. Most impressive is the way language melds with theme. On any page, the reader can see an understanding of language which seems both professional and instinctive. Silvis's strength is his embrace of the nature of words and his faith in narrative. This explains the achievement of Mysticus, whose descriptions will leave readers wistfully longing for more, even while they feel well fed on a sensual feast of feeling and thought. Buy this book and savor the way language and theme are almost one in Mysticus. As the dawning of the third millennium prompts us to remember where we've been, it may be that you read Mysticus just in time.

Mysticus follows the life and times of Ronald Shepard beginning as the nine-year-old child of servants to a millionaire playboy who lives on a private island off the coast of South Carolina and continuing through his adulthood. Ronald lives in a world of power, greed, ambition, and sex that spans from Marilyn Monroe (a goddess of seduction whose presence sweeps through the novel like an avalanche); to Cassandra DeRoy, a Sunset Boulevard teeny-bopper hooker (who bears a disconcerting resemblance to Marilyn); to sixteen-year-old Ginger Todd hitchhiking illegally across American in search of parents she has never known. Mysticus is a literary symphony of cosmic loneliness with a consummate mastery of prose revealing its profane and profound song of darkness and redemption. Author Randall Silvis offers the reader a giddy, bawdy ride through the mysteries of the human mind. Highly recommended.

A leg bone and the upper portion of an arm have been found in separate locations in north central Pennsylvania. As Diana reads the newspaper account, her blood freezes. She intuits that the victim is her younger brother. Tony was only fourteen, but had been on his own since she left her abusive home the day after her eighteenth birthday. Diana couldn't blame him for leaving too, and she refused to damn him for the harsh choices he made to stay alive on the streets. The police can't help since Diana can't even prove her brother missing. So she approaches filmmaker Mac Parris to help her. He's said to have an eye for detail, doesn't mind late hours, has the right equipment, and is within her price range.

Mac has his own demons to fight. Thirty years ago his life dramatically changed with the tragic loss of his wife and child. Now his nights are haunted by fire and only the deep woods, far from civilization, brings relief. Now he films the lives of wolverines and other scavengers, living his life on the path of most resistance. Perhaps he prefers having the odds stacked against him. And perhaps he feels more of a kinship for the wolverine than most of the members of his own species. Surprising himself, when Diana shows up at his doorstep requesting his help, he finds it "physically impossible at a time like that to say no to a girl with snowlights in her hair."

The more time Mac spends with the strong, yet strangely vulnerable Diana, the more he comes to realize that the vacuum he's defined as his life is sterile and useless. Her presence gives him a purpose beyond the vision of revenge he's held for thirty years. They come to know one another not by what each reveals but by that which they work to keep hidden. As their joint quest for answers leads them deep into a world of perversion, violence and decadence, the answers also lead these sharply compelling characters to a transformation of vision and self.

DEAD MAN FALLING is one of those strangely compelling novels that fits into the genre of murder, of mystery, of crime thriller, and yet it is so much more. DEAD MAN FALLING echoes the grace and profundity of much classic literature such as Hemingway's THE SUN ALSO RISES. Further, Randall Silvis' voice moves with a subtle depth and compassion that entrances the reader, drawing one deep within this absorbing narrative. Very highly recommended.

When his spouse died, Edgar Allan Poe drowns his sorrows by frequenting the local bars and over indulging. His disenchanted former protégé Augie Dubbins comes to Philadelphia to find Poe. Augie finds a shell of his mentor whose depression is bone deep. However, Augie has some good news. The Quintillian Society head Dr. Alfred K. Brunrichter wants Poe to come to Pittsburgh as his houseguest while providing lectures to the rank and file members.

When Poe and Dubbins arrive at their host's mansion, they are stunned as Brunrichter looks like Edgar's twin. The doctor wants Poe and his cohort to investigate the disappearance of several women in the last month or so. As Brunrichter keeps Poe in a virtual state of stupor with ether, Dubbins begins a search for the lost ladies. However, when Dubbins is accused of murder, Poe shakes off the daze to start his own inquiries including into that of his benefactor.

Though well written, DISQUIET HEART is radically different in mood and tone than the superb ON NIGHT'S SHORE. The sleuthing by Poe and Dubbins comes late in the tale, as the novel is more a historical fiction than a mystery. Instead readers glimpse a depressed pessimistic Poe spiraling into addiction. Still, the story line grips the audience as the atmosphere of 1847 Pittsburgh and Philadelphia vividly seems real through the actions of Poe and Dubbins. Though very gloomy, readers will appreciate Randall Silvis' latest tell tale Poe adventure.

Harriet Klausner

This mystery opens with a young boy viewing the murder and suicide of a baby and its young mother. Another body is discovered and the story begins. Resolution of the mystery surrounding the death of shopgirl Mary Rogers is augmented by the telling of the relationship between street urchin Augie and Edgar Alan Poe. It's rare to find a mystery where the reader is so taken in by the characters...a very worthwhile read.

In the summer of 1840 a New York street urchin witnesses a young woman throw her baby, then herself, into the murky Hudson River. Making a few pennies recounting the tragedy, ten-year-old Augie Dubbins meets an impoverished young journalist, Edgar Allan Poe.

Together they discover the body of another young woman caught under the docks and embark on an investigation which takes them from the squalor of the Five Points slums to the glitter of Fifth Avenue, where Augie learns that ruthless depravity thrives at all levels of society.

Narrated by Augie many years later "On Night's Shore" seamlessly incorporates elements of Poe's later tales into the narrative - "The Mystery of Marie Roget," "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Black Cat" - without overreaching. Poe is a gloomy, driven man whose genius is beset by poverty, nagging self-doubt and bouts of drunkenness. Augie, brutalized, clever, and resourceful ("in calamity, opportunity"), attaches himself to Poe as a father figure, enchanted by his family circle of consumptive, gentle wife and strong, generous mother-in-law.

Despite occasional backsliding into, respectively, despair and opportunism, Poe and Augie bring out the best in one another and together they delve into Mary Rogers' working class life, shattering several official versions of the murder on their winding path into the bastions of city power. Atmospheric and suspenseful, Silvis' ("An Occasional Hell," "Excelsior") character-driven story brings the city to life in all its cruelty and grandeur and the writing - mannered, gritty and eloquent - evokes the voice and sensibility of the time.

By MARILYN STASIO

The vibrant panorama of New York City in 1840 that Randall Silvis spreads before our eyes in ON NIGHT'S SHORE (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's Minotaur...) bears little resemblance to the flat, static scenes that unroll like so much wallpaper in most historical mysteries. Even more arresting is his sleuth, a wild-eyed newspaper journalist who signs himself E. A. Poe and makes his meager living peddling sensational crime stories like the one that captures his imagination here -- the murder of a shopgirl, Mary Rogers, whose bloated body is discovered in the Hudson River by Augie Dubbins, a 10-year-old ragamuffin who narrates the tale from the vantage of an old man.

The lively investigation conducted by this oddly matched pair of sleuths is interesting in its own right, providing rich background on the seminal short story (''The Mystery of Marie Rogt'') that helped establish Poe as the father of ratiocinative detective fiction. But let's give Silvis his own creative due. Despite his mannered tendency to ape what Augie calls Poe's ''funny way with words,'' Silvis delivers pungent impressions of the living city, exploring its mansions, slums, morgue, prisons, poorhouses and opium dens for all the ambient sounds and smells that define the character of a busy, brawling, unwashed metropolis.