Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl

Your average writer of thrillers should lust for Pessl’s deft touch with character. Still and all, “Night Film” has been precision-engineered to be read at high velocity, and its energy would be the envy of any summer blockbuster. Unfortunately, all those italics serve to draw the reader’s notice to exactly the wrong sort of lines, clunkers like “ It was too quiet” and “ Had I just sealed myself inside my own coffin?” Pessl is capable of fine prose, so her willingness to serve up “Hardy Boys” nuggets like these suggests she’s willfully dumbing herself down.

She also italicizes two or three sentences a page, an insecure tic like a child poking you in the ribs to ask if you’re paying attention. There are over a hundred chapters, most of the James Patterson two-page variety, a technique that adds a giddy accelerant to Pessl’s already zippy pacing. With pages of faked-up old photos, invented Web sites and satellite maps, “Night Film” - Pessl’s second novel, following “Special Topics in Calamity Physics” (2006) - asserts itself as a multimedia presentation more than an old-fashioned book.

No one can accuse Marisha Pessl of unfamiliarity with the tools of the modern thriller.

Together, the three make an adorably awkward family of misfits, who will be even more appealing should George Clooney, Ryan Gosling and Alison Brie be cast for the movie adaptation. Nor is McGrath the only one who wants to know what’s been going on behind the camera in short order he’s joined by a shabby but smoldering drug dealer named Hopper and a breathless ingénue, Nora Halliday. McGrath has a score to settle, so when Cordova’s achingly gifted daughter turns up dead in a Manhattan ruin, it’s Take 2 for the unemployed journalist. Consider the star reporter Scott McGrath, who plunged into disgrace after a preliminary investigation into Cordova’s secrets blew up in his face. Bad things happen to those who try to pick his locked closet for a look at the skeletons. Adding to the mystique is a sense that Cordova might have retreated because he has something unsavory to hide. They meet in condemned buildings marked by the symbol of a stylized eye to watch a “night film” - one of the psychologically punishing horror pictures of Stanislas Cordova, a master filmmaker who has shunned publicity with a zeal that makes Thomas Pynchon look like a shameless attention hog.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl