enhancements

The Supernatural Enhancements is from a younger author from Spain who, according to his bio on the book jacket, writes in Spanish, Catalan, and English. What that means for me is I get to read an author with a different viewpoint than the typical Amerocentric one I typically read, whose prose isn't colored by translation.

Edgar Cantero does have a different viewpoint. The Enhancements is written like a reconstruction of a series of events, via a combination of diary entries, handwritten notes, transcripts of audio and video recordings, and various other reprints of documents from receipts to newspaper clippings. This strange series of events centers around the mysterious death of a wealthy, young bachelor who appears to have leapt from the third story window of his family home, Axton House, in Virginia, just as his father did years before.

The unlikely investigators in this case are the long-lost second-cousin of the defenestrated eccentric bachelor, and his young Irish girlfriend.

The second cousin, named only A., is surprised when lawyers contact him in England to let him know that, one, he has a second cousin in America, two, that he has apparently killed himself and, three, that he has left everything--Axton House, all its contents, and a pile of loot--to him. Only recently graduated and wondering what to do with his life, twenty-something A. now finds himself independently wealthy, and the owner of a mansion with so many rooms that he and his extremely young girlfriend, Niamh,* can't keep track of them all, never mind the hedge maze on the grounds, or the butler who seems to have disappeared shortly after his employer's unexplained death.

There are puzzles, secret codes, ghostly whisperings, code names, vivid nightmares, break-ins, ass kickings, rescued pets, safes behind paintings, a two-story library schwing and green hair.

I'm going to be looking for Cantero's other books, and I predict that someone will smarten up and make this into a movie.

In the meantime, read (study? research?) this book.

Then add a comment telling me how much you liked it.



* That's an Irish name friend, apparently its pronounced nee+iv, or neev. Or that's as close as yer likely to git around these parts.