BOOKS: The Girl in the Glass, Jeffrey Ford (2005)

This year's Edgar Award winner in the Best Paperback Original category.

That's a category that may be obsolete soon. Ten or fifteen years ago, when paperback always meant mass-market, and paperback originals were generally considered to be (and usually were) the dregs of the publishing world, the category made some sense as a way to single out for praise the relatively few good books published in the format.

But now, the trade paperback format doesn't carry nearly the stigma that mass-market does, and major authors are seeing their work published as paperback originals; the playing field is relatively level now, and the best paperbacks are being acknowledged when they're published. There's less need today for a special category to rescue good paperbacks from obscurity. Ford's Depression-era novel is certainly as good as any mystery I've read in the last year.

Our narrator is Diego, a 17-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico who has lived since childhood with Thomas Schell. Schell is a con man, providing phony seances to the grieving wealthy of New York; Diego works as his assistant, "Ondoo," a turban-wearing mystic from India. (It is a running joke that none of Schell's clients are able to tell the difference between a Mexican and an Indian; brown faces are all the same to them.)

During one seance, Schell sees something that isn't part of his fakery, the image of a young girl in a pane of glass, silently beckoning for help. A few days later, the same face appears in the newspaper; the girl has disappeared and is presumed to have been kidnapped. Despite the fact that he has no actual psychic abilities at all, Schell volunteers his "services" to the girl's family.

Ford's prose is delightful to read. Diego's English has the precision that often comes when someone learns a second language, and the elegance of his era and milieu. The story is nicely plotted, with villains whose motives are historically apt and sufficiently evil to make the stakes high. I'm always fond of con-artist stories, and while Schell's con games aren't the principal focus of the story, there are some fascinating details of how he pulls off some of his effects. The final confrontation with the bad guys is a grand, exciting set piece with some very clever chicanery.