The Lizard
A search for a missing journalist uncovers layers of conspiracy and betrayal in Domenic Stansberry’s intriguing novel The Lizard, which is part thriller, part character study.
S. E. Reynolds, a former reporter, makes his living ghostwriting speeches for political up-and-comers. When he’s asked to track down his former colleague Max Seeghurs, his investigation leads him into a morass of murder and power plays. Indeed, he links Seeghurs’s investigation of a seedy Santa Fe resort to the rich politicians he services.
Reynolds is a flawed, dimensional hero. A family man and an adept journalist, he’s made his share of moral compromises, including sleeping with Seeghurs’s wife. As he descends into danger, he’s forced to reckon with these choices. In understated yet affecting flashbacks, he faces his difficult relationships with those closest to him, including his elderly parents. His inner ruminations are the novel’s backbone: he probes his own psyche even as he seeks the truth, his investigation leading him towards Seeghurs’s former connections, who have incriminating information of their own.
Reynolds’s quest takes him from Seeghurs’s apartment in a hurricane-battered Coney Island housing community to Nebraska and the Southwest. Tactile details make some passages haunting, as with a rain-drenched funeral service among cottonwood fields, where Reynolds reunites with his old flame. Elsewhere, a hallucinatory episode in which Reynolds hides out in a New Mexico mesa during a peyote ceremony reveals inner demons. The last third of the book takes an elliptical approach: Reynolds holes up in a ramshackle California beach town with only his own paranoia to keep him company.
The Lizard is a vibrant novel in which a man struggles to shake himself out of a moral stupor.
Reviewed by
Ho Lin
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