The Night Game

This bleak tale from Irish author Golden (The Two Women of Agantz) centers on Mary Reid, who belongs to a therapy group and lives by herself in her childhood home, a brownstone on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Shrouded in a fog both literal and figurative, Mary struggles with feelings of inadequacy as she tries to come to terms with her divorce from David Shaw, a painter. Threatening phone calls lead Mary to invite her friend Sheila Deane to stay with her—and into contact with the sinister Sergeant Keaney. Mary, Sheila, and Keaney get caught up in a vortex of sexual violence and degradation that includes everything from bondage to gang rape and murder. American readers may find the author’s use of words such as loo and knickers jarring in a New York setting. They should also be prepared for some overwrought prose (“The evidential lights seem like small annunciations in declensions of darkness”). (Oct.)