The Man of Maybe Half a Dozen Faces (Signed First Edition)

With two men already dead, strangled by printer cables, and a beautiful woman begging him for help, Skylight Howells is drawn into a dangerous, bizarre mystery. Original.

For his debut, Vukcevich employs a clever gimmick: Skylight Howells, a private investigator based in Eugene, Ore., is either a master of disguise or a sufferer of multiple personality. While investigating local police chief Frank Wallace on suspicion of cheating on his wife, Howells is hired by the alluring Prudence Deerfield to search for her missing brother, Pablo. Pablo's partner in the computer-manual business, Gerald Moffitt, has been found murdered, strangled with "a standard IEEE-1284 compliant parallel interface cable," and Prudence fears her brother may be the next victim. Howells enters the world of cyberspace in quest of a killer whose victims are all authors of frustratingly difficult computer manuals. Whether this is intended as satire, only Vukcevich knows. In any case, his uneven tale is at its best when it leaves technotalk behind and focuses on detection. Howells, meanwhile, is an odd lead character who will appeal to some readers but alienate others, a loner who consults an Internet therapist, tap-dances in local bars for fun, and has a kit full of disguises, including Lulu, a gal with a diet problem, and Dieter, a Mexican-food chef. A few red herrings, such as a Russian connection, don't amount to much. In the end the murderer, whom Howells unmasks through the use of tap-dancing therapy, proves an unimaginative choice. Despite some entertaining bits, this is, overall, a less than scintillating first novel. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

On the day pretty Prudence Deerfield walked into his office he happened to be Skylight Howells. But he could just as easily have been Scarface, or The Average Guy, or even Lulu if he'd been in a cross-dressing mood. Nor would that have run the gamut of his disguises. His real identityif real is a word with any application to someone so ephemeralis Brian Dobson, and as Dobson he practices a weird brand of private investigation in Eugene, Oregon. Not that weird dismays Prudence for a minute. She needs weird, she tells Brian, to help find her twin brother, Pablo, who has disappeared somewhere in the Never-Never Land of Virtual Reality. Pablo, in fear for his life, vanished after the murder of Gerald Moffitt, his partner in GP Ink, a company that produces computer manuals. It soon becomes evident that somebody has it in for subpar documentaliststhat is, for the ham-fisted scribes who so garble the honorable language of the how-to that their manuals drive honest, hard-working computer geeks to the brink of insanity. Though not without sympathy for the aims of this documentalist serial killer, Brian (or Skylight or . . . whatever) realizes that a halt must be called, while acknowledging that he might be the best man for the jobor that he would be if his 12-step program could ever control the subversive nature of his powerful addiction to tap-dancing. (Yes, tap- dancing.) Though newcomer Vukcevich does have storytelling skills, this one's for computer savants onlyand may be too bizarro for many of them. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Brian Dobson, the multiple-personality gent of the title, uses his plural personae and a closetful of disguises to advance his private investigations: Skylight (detective), Dieter (Mexican chef), Dennis (computer nerd), Lulu (female operative), and others. The cases at hand concern the "off-stage" serial murders of bad computer documentation writers and whether a certain police detective is cheating on his wife. Brian's personalities usually work solo, but they are wont to have dead-pan brainstorming sessions to develop theories. Can a certified member of society's lunatic fringe become some kind of hero, comic or otherwise? Not here.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.