McMahon, an aging rock star finds himself deep in an inexplicable problem. Years ago, a young woman, nanny to a friend's child, died while the band was in France. Now, suddenly, he is receiving letters from her. Letters full of intimate details and knowledge. Letters whose dark vision is beginning to threaten his own sanity. Seeking an answer McMahon hires Beau Youselli, a moonlighting police detective, to solve the mystery. But the past is not to be dealt with so lightly.

Youselli is the perfect antihero. Shallow, in the middle of a divorce, and not quite able to control either his violence or his lust, he provides a chilling counterpoint to the other characters in the book - all of whom seem to play equal parts as victims and victimizers. For Youselli, there is no truth, only things to take advantage of as he picks away at threads that seem to go every which way. He despises McMahon, is turned on by women whose lives have become meaningless and boring, and is hopelessly drawn to the writer of the letters.

The plot of the story is simple; one pastiche after another of Youselli's almost furtive attempts to find the reality of Leah, the dead letter writer. What he finds is layer after layer of misdirection and deception. The truth is so ephemeral and elusive that the detective's own identity seems to suffer as the story unfolds. Interspersed with these pastiches are the letters themselves, as well as a series of interior monologues from McMahon, and pieces of the story of Edith, an older psychologist Youselli first uses as a resource and then turns into a lover.

If anomie, the feeling of disassociation, were to be made into a mystery novel, Back From the Dead would be it. Youselli's almost psychotic detachment from the violence he receives and enacts, coupled with his obsessive quest for someone who, if she exists at all would not be for him, provide the impetus for a series of events that only resolve themselves by happenstance. McMahon's friends, the participants in the accident, are all somehow broken or flawed. They move with a jerky mechanical rhythm which hypnotizes the reader. Despite the title, there is no hope of rebirth, of redemption here. In this tale there are no heroes.

I am not sure how I feel about this book, whether it is a novel or a mystery story, or whether it succeeds or not. Chris Petit is an ingenious author, lending credibility to the outlandish, working multi-layered themes, and even using confusion as a plot device. But I found the literary nature of the book almost distracting. We are not used to having to think as much as Petit requires in order to absorb his efforts. I have to give credit where credit is due, the book is well written, atmospheric and chilling. I will remember more of the story than several I have read recently. But it is not a novel that I would care to reread anytime soon.

--Marc Ruby