Flashbacks and flashforwards are shuffled with dizzying cinematic flair. An evocative scene set in Big Sur, California later turns out to be something other than what we imagined. All of the characters, including Phillip Craven and Patricia Ridgeway, withhold information from each other and second-guess and question one another's motives. Some readers may find themselves baffled by the book's edgy postmodern approach to storytelling, but the elliptical style adds immeasurably to the mystery and suspense. The third-person narrative voice isn't always consistent from chapter to chapter.
Authorial omniscience is arbitrary or disembodied at times.
An editorial aside on the Vietnam War and the 1960s, for example, is awkwardly shoehorned into the text at one point. But more often than not, the novel's eccentricities yield surprising and startling results. There's a moment when we abruptly find ourselves privy to the thoughts of an aging and overweight coroner at the crime scene of a murdered woman. The coroner is named Pete Baker and he appears nowhere else in the book. Pete looked around the room, trying to get a sense of the person who had lived there.