Synopses & Reviews
From the Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winning author comes a suspenseful and mind-bending novel about Eldon Chance, a forensic neuropsychiatrist at the end of his rope.
In a land of lost dreams, California has many fault lines, and in recent years novelist Kem Nunn has proved as fine a guide to them as one could hope,” says the Los Angeles Times. Nunn’s literary reputation has been built over the course of five novels that create stories of suspense in the myriad subcultures of California, including the surfing world, the Mojave Desert, the Mexico borderlands, and the exurban zones of drug use and nasty violence. His writing is formal yet lush, and often laced with a chilling black humor. Newsweek said Nunn’s The Dogs of Winter is “the greatest novel ever written about surfing,” while The Washington Post called him the “principal heir to the tradition of Raymond Chandler and Nathanael West.”
Nunn’s new novel is a dark book involving psychiatric mystery, sexual obsession, fractured identities, and terrifyingly realistic violence—a tale told amid the back streets of California’s Bay Area, far from the cleansing breezes of the ocean. This is a landscape where nameless persons lose their identities and find new ones after days of sex in a motel room, where homeless war veterans create neo-hippie encampments—this is California noir, this is Kem Nunn country. It’s not pretty, it’s not sweet, but it is disturbing and unforgettable.
The antihero of this book, Dr. Eldon Chance, a neuropsychiatrist, is a man primed for spectacular ruin. Into Dr. Chance’s blighted life walks Jaclyn Blackstone, the abused, attractive wife of an Oakland homicide detective, a violent and jealous man. Jaclyn appears to be suffering from a dissociative identity disorder. In time, Chance will fall into bed with her—or is it with her alter ego, the voracious and volatile Jackie Black? The not-so-good doctor, despite his professional training, isn’t quite sure—and thereby hangs his fascination with her. But when you get Jaclyn, you get her husband, Raymond, a formidable and dangerous adversary.
Meanwhile, Chance also meets a young man named D, a self-styled, streetwise philosopher skilled in the art of the blade. It is around this trio of unique and dangerous individuals that longguarded secrets begin to unravel, obsessions grow, and the doctor’s carefully arranged life comes to the brink of implosion.
Amid San Francisco’s fluid, ever-shifting fog, in the cool, gray city of love, Dr. Chance will at last be forced to live up to his name. Chance is a twisted, harrowing, and impossible-to-put-down head trip through the fun house of fate, mesmerizing until the very last page.
Review
“Brilliant and cerebral psychological thriller”
Review
“Kem Nunn’s suspenseful and sinewy thriller demonstrates the mastery of psychological insight and cool observation his readers have learned to rely upon. Nunn’s characters range from pathological multiple personalities to a police detective bent more ways from sundown, all of them dangerous characters who would never for a moment let their professional or personal corruption interfere with murder, especially if it concerns an affair of the heart. That Dr. Eldon Chance, the tormented hero attempting to make his way through the chambered psyches of these lost souls is by profession a forensic psychiatrist makes for a deadly, absolutely satisfying storytelling. Chance is suspenseful contemporary crime fiction unrivaled in its intensity.”
Review
“Is it too much to compare Kem Nunn to Raymond Chandler? Like Chandler, Nunn’s great subject is what lies beneath the surface, the desolation that infuses us at every turn. . . The power of this disturbing and provocative novel is that it leaves us unmoored among the signposts of a morally ambiguous universe in which, even after we have finished reading, it is uncertain who has been feeding whom.”
Review
“Lives spin out of control and rattle like pinballs through the greedy, self-destructive, violent backdrop of this American life.”
Review
"Chance takes place in the twilit world of noir, where people and things are never what they seem…For all the mayhem - its ending is delicately funny."
Review
"Sentence by sentence Nunn achieves a muscular eloquence - I almost wrote elegance - unusual in what at first appears to be a genre novel. There hasn't been fiction this good about a San Francisco medical professional gone off the rails over a woman since Frank Norris' deluded dentist in the 1899 novel 'McTeague.'"
Review
“The book could be considered a pulp masterpiece. It has everything from a femme fatale to a dystopian setting where the California sun is blotted out by a black-ash fog from wildfires burning around the Bay. Chance is the kind of everyman whose bad choices are noir staples. But calling it pulp would undersell the sheer genius of the writing, which uses the convention of mystery-thrillers to create a psychological allegory of Freud’s construct, id, ego and superego at war with themselves.”
Review
"Chance is a story of nerve shattering suspense… a spellbinding ride of darkness, violence and sexuality…while the philosophical questions that Chance puts forth never fail to intrigue us, Nunn also never forgets that he is giving us a tale of mystery and suspense, one that may damn well be a modern masterpiece."
Synopsis
In an intense tale of psychological suspense, a San Francisco psychiatrist becomes sexually involved with a female patient who suffers from multiple personality disorder, and whose pathological ex-husband is an Oakland homicide detective—from a
Los Angeles Times Book Prize-winning author.
Dr. Eldon Chance is a brilliant, lonely, forensic neuropsychologist with a long track record of getting involved with damaged, complicated women. While apartment hunting after separating from his wife, a series of bad decisions leads to Chance sleeping with a patient named Jaclyn Blackstone. Unfortunately her ex-husband is an Oakland homicide detective and the jealous type. Meanwhile, Dr. Chance meets a young man who goes by “D”; Chance believes he is a war-veteran, but he is in fact a deranged loner and self-styled Samurai skilled in the art of the blade. D is fascinated by Chance’s tales of his tormented and increasingly dangerous affair with Jaclyn and advises him that her ex-husband will find a way to destroy Chance.
As Detective Blackstone does indeed threaten the doctor, Chance and D plan a counter-strike. Meanwhile Chance continues his steamy affair with Jaclyn Blackstone (or is it one of her multiple personalities?) But the sexually voracious “Jackie Black” has a story that is far more complex and darker than he could have ever imagined…
Gritty, twisted, and impossible to put down, the surprises keep coming in Chance until the final page has been turned.
About the Author
Kem Nunn is a third-generation Californian whose previous novels include The Dogs of Winter, Pomona Queen, Unassigned Territory, and Tapping the Source, which was made in to the film Point Break. Tijuana Straits won the Los Angeles Times Book Award. He lives in Southern California, where he also writes screenplays for television and film.