By Sylvia Nasar Golden youth achieves the impossible.
Gods strike down the mortal who dares too much.
A man beyond redemption finds salvation. These grand themes have inspired storytellers from ancient times through today. Roy Blount Jr. While his buddies like Dave Barry and Bill Murray rocket to ever-higher paychecks, Blount has always been a moving target, that guy in the back of the room muttering the really funny lines under his breath. With Be Sweet, Blount cracks the curtain a little and lets us see the wizard at the controls. With obvious relish, Forbes pushes this genre to its limits, combining Shakespeare and alchemy, meteorology and chaos theory, with probably more unabashed melodrama and plot paraphernalia than any serious mystery writer since Wilkie Collins and Arthur Conan Doyle.