THE SILVERBERG BUSINESS

Angela Carter meets Cormac McCarthy in The Silverberg Business, a gloriously strange hard-boiled tale that crosses genres and defies expectations

It is 1888 and Shannon, a Chicago private detective, returns home to Galveston, Texas for a wedding. Galveston's new rabbi asks Shannon to find Nathan Silverberg, gone missing along with a group of swindlers who claim to be soliciting money for a future colony of Romanian Jewish refugees. What seems to be a simple job soon pushes Shannon into stranger territory as his investigations lead him to a malevolent white-haired gambler, monstrous sand dune totems, and a group of skull-headed poker players trapped in an endless loop of cards and alcohol, who may be his only means to survive the business
• Robert Freeman Wexler turns to the state he was born and brought up in and takes the best parts of mysteries and westerns to forge something, as Publishers Weekly said in its starred review, “Steeped in the early history of Texas's statehood and laced with eerie portents of supernatural horror.”