Robert Barnard Dying Flames

Dying Flames

Robert Barnard

Scribner, Aug 2006, $24.00

ISBN: 0743272196

In Colchester, nineteen years old Christa greets somewhat almost famous author Graham Broadbent by saying "hi dad". She insists that he sired her, but he claims he was overseas at the time she would have been conceived. He knew her mother Peggy, but swears he has no children by any woman, but Christa insists her mom has said for years he was her biological dad before she leaves, disappointed in his denial.

Unable to let it go, Graham visits Peggy, who he enjoyed a fling with two decades ago, but also knows she appreciated all men she met in the early 1980s. However, Peggy stuns Graham when she sweetly says that he indeed sired a child by her, just not Christa. Astonished and confused he wants to meet his son. Drama queen Peggy arranges a dinner for him, her other "dads" and their children to meet one another. At the hostile affair, no one knows who sired whom except perhaps Peggy. She is unable to because someone murdered her.

The sharp sawed satire that has made Robert Barnard a popular author is less in your face than usual, but throughout the novel there is an ironic undercutting of the cast especially the lead protagonist. Mr. Barnard explores how an unanticipated incident can shake a person's demeanor forcing an abrupt change in the mask used to protect one from society intrusion as the former visage fails to shield anymore. Thus readers obtain a deep character story with a late murder mystery as Graham and the audience wonder who amidst the fathers and children killed the matriarch and more important does it really matter.

Harriet Klausner