Sock
*Starred Review* Jillette's the big, goggled guy with the wavy Steven Seagal do, who yaks a mile a minute while his ever-silent partner, Teller, performs illusions that make Houdini look like a duffer. He writes the way he talks, in a sort of blizzard of smart-alecky, philosophical wit, but adds a pop-song allusion to nearly every paragraph; perhaps the only thing like his style is Stephen King streaming the consciousness of one of his crazed, possessed lowlifes. Jillette's narrator in his first novel is something King could have created: a sock monkey named Dickie, the childhood doll of a now six-foot-six diver for the NYPD, who fishes stiffs out of the drink, and whom Dickie calls the Little Fool. When he dredges up the overstabbed corpse of the woman he loved, Nell, a stripper-lapdancer with an intellectual streak and bed skills for days, he determines to find her killer, who in short order reprises his act with four more women and two men. The Little Fool enlists Tommy, his and Nell's homosexual mutual friend, and the two launch an investigation, strictly illegal (the Little Fool's a diver-cop, not a detective), that culminates in a nail-biting, comical, gory, bittersweet showdown. The denouement, in which Dickie yields the floor and a moral is drawn (viz., Don't have faith! [Jillette's a nonbeliever, big-time]), rather stomps things flat, but until then,Sockis socko!Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved