![]() ![]() ![]() Readers hear from Erica Coleman, a police detective with a complacent husband and troubled son Anderson Baker, a bowling-alley proprietor irritated over shared parking with the Guerraoui’s diner the widowed Maryam Guerraoui and even the deceased Driss Guerraoui. With each chapter, the story baton passes seamlessly to a new or returning narrator. Naturally, he wants no entanglement with law enforcement. The third chapter shifts to Efraín Aceves, an undocumented laborer who stops in the dark to adjust his bicycle chain and witnesses the lethal impact. He hears about the hit-and-run as he reports to work as a deputy sheriff. Nora’s old middle school band mate, Jeremy Gorecki, an Iraq War veteran beset with insomnia, narrates the next chapter. Here, she begins in the voice of Nora Guerraoui, a nascent jazz composer, who recalls: "My father was killed on a spring night four years ago, while I sat in the corner booth of a new bistro in Oakland.” She was drinking champagne at the time. In her fourth book, Lalami is in thrilling command of her narrative gifts, reminding readers why The Moor’s Account (2014) was a Pulitzer finalist. A hit-and-run in the Mojave Desert dismantles a family and puts a structurally elegant mystery in motion. ![]()
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