PUZZLE FOR FIENDS. [Hardcover]

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: P/B (1955)
• ASIN: B000HKQWPK
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,100,839 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3.0 out of 5 stars Friends or Fiends?, June 18, 2008

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Puzzle For Fiends (Paperback)

PUZZLE FOR FIENDS suffers, perhaps, from not having enough Iris in it, but the situation is a corker. Peter says goodbye to Iris at the airport, then picks up a hitchhiker for some erotic fun, and winds up in a concussion in a fabulous sort of Neutra house in Southern California, the victim of amnesia. He's got a broken arm, a broken leg, and all around him sinister people who say that he's Gordon Friend the IIIrd, the dissolute son of a tee-totaling millionaire. His mother, sister, wife and doctor are all in on the plot, which takes a bit of swallowing, but I wish I were Jonathan Lethem to explain the peculiar fascination amnesia has over me, so for me the pleasure of the novel is seeing Peter react to the various psychio stresses which threaten to rock the boat these plotters (the fiends of the title) are planning, even though we don't know quite what it is.

Gradually we make out that these fiends are pretending that Peter is their son/brother/husaband Gordy in order to secure an enormous inheritance.

It wouldn't be a Patrick Quentin book without Peter being impressed by a couple of muscle studs with glistening skin packed into skimpy speedos. Here we have Nordic Jan, the enormous, nearly mute male nurse who picks up Peter like he was a feather and washes his intimate areas with gleeful precision. Then their is the feminine, houri-eyed Dr. Nate, dark with white trunks, his body a whisper of sinful sensation (and part of the devilish plot that ensnares Peter).

The situation is unique among the Quentin books however and seems written with the success of the then-recent movie MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS in mind. I think that Charlotte Armstrong might have really made a good book out of it (her later DREAM OF FAIR WOMAN rivals Cornell Woolrich's BLACK CURTAIN as my pick for the best American suspense novel centering on amnesia), but Armstrong wouldn't have put the steamy sex haze around everything the way Quentin can. The cast is too limited for the reader to be shocked by the last minute revelation, but I give it marks for trying something different.