Secrets of the Camera Obscura

Invented by two Chinese eccentrics, stolen by Leonardo da Vinci, and exploited by the Dutch painter Vermeer, the camera obscura has a mysterious and eventful past that now appears to be linked to several murders.
In a contemporary American city, a beautiful young woman who frequented the camera obscura is found decapitated just beyond the range of its lens. Another visitor to the tourist attraction, a secretive art student, becomes the prime suspect. Watching them all is the man who runs the camera obscura - a black room with a moveable lens to the outside world. From this cliff-top perch he writes the enigmatic history of the camera obscura's invention and its use, all the while unveiling strangely parallel tales of love and obsession.
With sharp humor, historical revelations, and increasingly sinister clarity, author David Knowles unfolds this layered and unpredictable tale of duplicity and jealousy and the special powers of the camera obscura.

YA-The mood is Poe-esque; the premise of a male photographer/storyteller working and living in a camera obscura is offbeat. An Italian woman whom the photographer met has been decapitated and he feels compelled to solve the murder. Now a dash of history is added through flashbacks, as readers see through the storyteller's eyes interesting details about the lives of two Chinese inventors as well as about Leonardo da Vinci and Vermeer. The theme of decaptiation surfaces again and again. YAs interested in photography, art, history, or a good mystery will be fascinated by the emotional tension in this novella.
Ginny Ryder, R.E. Lee High School, Springfield, VA
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The second of this publisher's pair of new novellas (see The Forty Fathom Bank , above), Knowles's disturbing debut explores the strange spell cast by the camera obscura, a room-size camera whose reflections cause dark behavior among those who explore its unique perspective. Part murder mystery, part historical flashback, the story is told by the camera's caretaker, a recluse who documents the camera's past in a journal while charging a minimal sum to tourists who wish to enter the device. When a young Italian woman who is a regular visitor to the giant camera is decapitated on a nearby cliff, the caretaker becomes suspicious of a gentleman who made her acquaintance inside the camera. Woven into the narrator's recitations of suspicion, guilt and jealousy is the account of the camera's bizarre past, which involves its two Chinese inventors, Leonardo da Vinci, who refined and perfected it, and Vermeer, who used the camera's perspective in his paintings. Knowles ably juggles story and premise, capturing the narrator's Dostoyevskian guilt through a terse, agitated interior monologue. Though the history proves sometimes difficult to follow, Knowles surmounts this minor flaw to deliver an intriguing set piece effectively overlaid with an atmosphere of menace and mystery.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Chronicle kicks off a new series of novellas in hardcover (see also Les Galloway's The Forty Fathom Bank, above) with a work highly reminiscent of Umberto Eco (among others) in its combination of historical research and contemporary suspense. Knowles, a professional musician and a product of the writing program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, gives his story an unnamed narrator who owns and operates a camera obscura, a viewing device whose origins go back to 13th-century China. The San Francisco resident also keeps a journal in which he is writing a history of three key events in the development of the camera obscura; concerning respectively its Chinese inventors, Leonardo da Vinci, and Vermeer, the stories each end with a brutal murder by decapitation. Although most of the narrator's customers are tourists just passing through, he has two regular clients, a beautiful Italian woman and an art student named Darin. When the Italian is killed and her head severed, he becomes obsessed with the mystery. The narrative interweaves the three stories from his journals, each of which centers on a betrayal involving the camera obscura and a beautiful woman, with his growing conflict with Darin over what he takes to be the student's presumption about the Italian woman. Knowles does a terrific job with the narrator's evolving voice, which in the beginning is coolly, almost eerily detached, then shifts subtly over the course of the book as he becomes increasingly agitated at the direction the murder investigation is taking. An intriguing first effort, working some thoughtful changes on the idea of vision and the theme of betrayal, marred by a simplistic and predictable trick ending right out of an old Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.