Chance (Nunn) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Kem Nunn's crafty new novel…Chance takes place in the twilit world of noir, where people and things are never what they seem. But this book isn't a tragic noir like Vertigo or Out of the Past, whose cunning femme fatale Jaclyn/Jackie sometimes brings to mind. It's a farce, of an unusually violent and dark-spirited kind…Nunn, a connoisseur of slippery slopes, just gives his uptight protagonist a gentle shove and watches him go down, every bump and stumble duly noted with a sort of dry relish
Terrence Rafferty - New York Times Book Review


Is it too much to compare Kem Nunn to Raymond Chandler? Like Chandler, Nunn’s great subject is what lies beneath the surface, the desolation that infuses us at every turn.... The power of this disturbing and provocative novel is that it leaves us unmoored among the signposts of a morally ambiguous universe in which, even after we have finished reading, it is uncertain who has been feeding whom.
Los Angeles Times


Sentence by sentence Nunn achieves a muscular eloquence—I almost wrote elegance—unusual in what at first appears to be a genre novel. There hasn't been fiction this good about a San Francisco medical professional gone off the rails over a woman since Frank Norris' deluded dentist in the 1899 novel McTeague.
Alan Cheuse - San Francisco Chronicle


The book could be considered a pulp masterpiece. It has everything from a femme fatale to a dystopian setting where the California sun is blotted out by a black-ash fog from wildfires burning around the Bay. Chance is the kind of everyman whose bad choices are noir staples. But calling it pulp would undersell the sheer genius of the writing, which uses the convention of mystery-thrillers to create a psychological allegory of Freud’s construct, id, ego and superego at war with themselves.
Arizona Republic


(Starred review.) [A] brilliant and cerebral psychological thriller. The quiet, ordered life of Dr. Eldon Chance, a recently divorced Bay Area forensic neuropsychiatrist, begins to unravel when he makes a series of ill-fated decisions.... [A]surprising conclusion.
Publishers Weekly


Psychiatrist Eldon Chance, who makes his living providing testimony in court cases, is appalled to see the life he had so carefully constructed for himself break apart.... Nunn...excels at creating complicated, flawed characters with fascinating backstories. This gritty, twisted tale will be of prime interest to noir fans. —Joanne Wilkinson
Booklist


[G]ritty.... Nunn, a writer with a gift for subtlety and wordplay, spins a story that is both mesmerizing and a bit confusing. Readers will find Nunn's story well-written for the most part but not always engaging. Lovers of Nunn's previous novels may discover in Chance a less than creditable antihero.
Kirkus Reviews