Nunn, Kem. Chance
Scribner, 2014
ISBN 978–1–5011–6467–5
San Francisco hosts this novel, but not the charming city by the bay. This is the San Francisco of fog, mist, and nighttime crime, where thoughts and desires scuttle off down the darkest paths and then emerge from the depths to bite us.
This is where we meet Dr. Eldon Chance. As a forensic neuropsychiatrist, he doesn’t have patients whom he treats regularly. Instead, he works as a consultant, meeting each patient only once for evaluation. That’s how he met Jaclyn Blackstone, referred for evaluation of periods of poor concentration and intermittent memory loss.
And that’s where contact between Dr. Chance and Ms. Blackstone should have ended, unless you’re an antihero like Chance who loves to obsess about the lives of his once-met clients. When the doctor and Ms. Blackstone meet each other in a bookstore, an ill-advised and dangerous liaison develops between them. Chance just can’t resist the advances of Jaclyn Blackstone. Or is it another personality, Jackie Black, who attracts him?
Chance’s relationship with Ms. Blackstone attracts the attention of the husband she’s trying to separate from, Oakland homicide detective Raymond Blackstone. His stature as a police officer allows him to wage an effective war of threats and intimidation. As Chance’s relationship with Jaclyn develops, so does the antagonization from the dangerous detective.
The novel becomes progressively more sinister as the reader learns more about the backgrounds of both Eldon Chance and Jaclyn Blackstone. In the meantime, Chance comes under the spell of a young man who calls himself D. D. is a self-proclaimed warrior of the blade to whom Chance appeals for help when he realizes the threat Det. Blackstone poses. All of these people come together on a dark, foggy night in a way that leaves more questions than answers in a noir world where nothing is ever quite certain and mistakes have a way of repeating themselves.
I read this novel after watching the series on streaming service Hulu. The television version, starring Hugh Laurie as Eldon Chance and Gretchen Mol as Jaclyn Blackstone, accurately captured the novel’s atmosphere of threat and dread, and the actors well portrayed characters caught in a life in which chance and the darkness of the human heart determine inevitable outcomes.
© 2017 by Mary Daniels Brown
