The Fact Checker - Austin Kelley

[troisoiseaux]

Read The Fact Checker by Austin Kelley, about a fact-checker at a magazine that is clearly the New Yorker (although, in retrospect, I don't think it's ever actually name-dropped?) in early 2000s NYC, who plays detective when an attractively eccentric young woman he meets as a source disappears shortly after making vague comments about something "nefarious" going on at the farmer's market where she works. It reminded me a bit of Dwyer Murphy's An Honest Living, but more picaresque than neo-noir. I enjoyed the narrative voice, with its scattered references of a brain full of trivia - particularly about 19th century American communal societies like the Shakers, Oneida, and Amos Bronson Alcott's Fruitlands - and turns of phrase like: "There was a long theremin solo, which sounded slightly like a little girl soprano and slightly like the inside of a lemon."

Two... warnings, I guess? First: despite the premise, it's very much not a mystery, because the girl is in fact not missing and just took off on her own accord, which, as people keep telling the main character, is a thing she does sometimes. Second, there is one wildly unexpected, deeply weird scene involving animal death of a "livestock animal killed for meat" variety, but by someone who has no idea what he's doing and is, inexplicably, doing it in a luxury NYC apartment, so it's... actually quite disturbing.