Just as a bit of sky joins a rooftop in a jigsaw puzzle, so does each piece in this novel join together. Literally out of a box, the pieces come: diaries, letters, and stories, and then stories within stories—about a poet in Vienna, a French sailor on the Atlantic, an immigrant family in Argentina, an Italian stonemason, and a mad painter in Israel—until in the end a picture emerges and, as a result, the mystery of a tragic murder is solved. 

BART MIDWOOD’s previous fiction includes Bodkin (Random House, 1967), Phantoms (Dutton, 1970), The Nativity (Bel Esprit, 1981), and Bennett’s Angel (British-American, 1989).