Box 991

Semi¿Dual-urbane, unnervingly calm, and armed with strange arts as surely as any detective carries a notebook-returns to put occult craft at the service of justice. He is part metaphysician, part magistrate of the moral order: a man who reads thought¿waves as others read footprints, charts the pressure of fate by the stars, and arranges ordinary facts so they point toward the extraordinary truth. In "Snared," a plucky woman and a hard¿bitten detective vanish into the city's underworld. Where policemen see only danger, Semi¿Dual perceives pattern: he moves unseen through Chinatown, lays bait and counter¿bait, and converts a desperate decoy into a rescue no one else could have conceived. In "Box 991," a missing hoard and a set of impossible signatures challenge every mundane skill in the book. Semi¿Dual thinks in circles-astrological, forensic, metaphysical-untangling forgery, duplicity, and mechanized trickery with patient, uncanny logic until the hidden method and the hidden moral can both be named. Two lean, cabalistic thrillers in which detection is as much a matter of the spirit as of the senses-and one indomitable mind reads the world until it yields its secrets.