Bøker av Reid Baron

As New Year's approaches, a gorgeous and talented, young red-haired Englishwoman who works for an international auditing firm in Rio de Janeiro is increasingly involved with a murder, macumba (Brazilian black magic), and a search for what she really believes.

This is a basketball novel, the way that Moby Dick is a book about whales. It's late in the Seventies. Principal narrator Rashid Stokes, the "first black, professional-basketball-destined, top drawer student-athlete, California Key Scholar up from not-quite ghetto dog," narrates the story of Mystic Williams, his New York Knick teammate. Mystic, actually Richard, arrived in the NBA and let his play do the talking for him, a pose reminiscent of the early Larry Bird. From the outset, Mystic's strawberry blonde wife Fran makes an impression on Rashid. After several years in the NBA, wunderkind Mystic has a monstrous accident. Here's Rashid's description: "After his scoring hand brushed the rim Mystic located himself looking down at the basket, nothing new, but this time, floating lazily backwards, his feet above his head, the floorboards with their waxy golden wood gleam below his surprised eyes, and coming up fast. His head had struck the rim lightly on the way down, and every fan in the arena sucked in a collective breath." Mystic recovers, but are his skills intact? He's now strangely transformed; he's writing poetry, and it's important to him. The basketball star begins to examine experience according to his eccentric, newly discovered Verve Theory. Is this guy crazy, or is he seeing more? Is there something happening on the court that's beyond basketball? Can management handle it? Rashid tells the story while flying to Africa, "to catch up with-or was it rescue? --Fran and 'Mystic' Williams." He's not sure. He is deeply involved emotionally and philosophically in Fran and Mystic's story, and he recounts the athletic inner and outer lives with passion throughout. We travel from New York to Philadelphia and San Francisco, to Spain and Greece, shooting hoops and searching.

All But One includes The General, eight more short stories and a novella previously published as an e-book, Witches' Coffee, A Miracle Brew from Brazil. Eclectic in style, the stories run the gamut from a Runyon-like wrestling match in The Incredible Hunk, to the atmospheric Latin American suspense of The General, who spends a weekend with his wife and security detail at his country house. Miss Hap Goes to Paris is a whimsical riff on the gift trip taken by a confused young man who has won a radio contest, together with his sophisticated lady partner. Over Our Heads offers a glance back at the art world of the 1990's, and Soccer Zombies Coming Soon, exposes the lengths to which ambitious relatives will go to support their children's soccer squads. Witches' Coffee is the tale of Vanessa Saxe, an ambitious young Englishwoman who works in Human Resources at an international accounting firm in Rio de Janeiro. She becomes involved with a crime story and "black magic" (macumba) when a job applicant reports that his wife has recently died. Vanessa comes to question the possibility that Brazilian macumba might offer something more than candles on street corners and saints with -- to her -- unfamiliar names. Closing action takes place at Ipanema Beach on New Year's, where the goddess Iemanja floats in to shore to celebrate with her followers. Rastafarians and record players, Frankenstein and Arabian sheiks occupy these works of magic realism.