"Nerve Damage"
By Peter Abrahams
William Morrow, $24.95
In tales of suspense, almost nobody can be trusted. The best friend, the high-school sweetheart, the authority figures and institutions we're told to respect -- any one of these at any point can (and probably will) turn out to be unreliable, treacherous or downright diabolical. The only one you can really count on is the hero. He (or she), with allowances for minor flaws, will always be resourceful, intrepid and act out of a fundamental integrity. Peter Abrahams' manly protagonists don't really depart from that norm, but this author has hit upon an unusual twist: What his heroes can't trust is their own bodies.
In his 2005 novel, "Oblivion," Abrahams' hero is a hotshot private detective who has to re-create his own investigation halfway through the book when he suffers a stroke that wipes out selective parts of his memory. In his latest book, "Nerve Damage," Roy Valois, one of those sculptors who works in monumental scrap metal and lives in rugged isolation in small-town Vermont, learns that he's suffering from a fast-moving cancer linked to the summer he spent as a teenager demolishing an asbestos-stuffed building. An experimental drug trial offers some hope, but only the advent of mortality would prompt a man in his late 40s to hack into the New York Times' obituary database on a dare from an old friend, wondering if the Times will mention his big score in a college hockey game.
Roy discovers what he thinks is a minor error in the piece; his beloved and much-mourned late wife, Delia, worked for a think tank, not the U.N. But when the obit writer he complains to has trouble establishing the facts, and then turns up murdered, Roy starts looking into her past himself. Have the think tank and Delia's former boss simply evaporated from the face of the earth, or is Roy's memory muddled by the exotic chemicals being piped into his veins? It would be a lot easier to investigate if he wasn't falling asleep at odd moments or suddenly overcome by bouts of overwhelming weakness.
Roy's search for the truth about Delia is suspenseful, all right, though her secret is fairly routine by the standards of today's conspiracy fiction. What gives "Nerve Damage" its juice is the anxiety that arises from Roy's unaccustomed and unpredictable physical vulnerability. He's a man used to relying on his body -- its strength, coordination and stamina -- and perhaps his biggest challenge lies in recognizing that he can't rely on it any longer. After a lifetime of stoic independence, can he figure out how to ask for help? If the drug trial doesn't work, then time is fast running out in his quest to find out what really happened to Delia.
Roy's condition imbues the book's action sequences with an acute tension, but it also makes even an interstate road trip a source of potential peril. This sort of scenario invites authorial excess, but there's not a speck of self-indulgence or sentimentality to be found in "Nerve Damage," not even the boozy, bruised romanticism of noir. As ever, Abrahams' wiry, disciplined prose keeps the novel sharpened to a needle's point. That's something he can always be counted on to deliver.
-- Laura Miller