A café noir, a half-thriller or mystery woven through financial speculation on the early market for coffee in Europe.
It gets a lot of its film noir feel from the social conditions of the Portuguese Jews living in Amsterdam in 1659. They've fled the Inquisition. Many were brought up as Secret Jews and are having to relearn or learn how to live as Jews. They are proud of being, on the whole, well-off among the burghers of Amsterdam, so they are also dissociating themselves from the poor Eastern European Jews who are trying to immigrate.
The internal ruling council of the Portuguese Jews therefore pretends to feel equal to the main society, but they're acting as enforcers against their own and are terrified - justly - of even a hint of scandal in the larger world. The cross-loyalties and dirty politics are far past the complication of, say, 's Daly City. The several narrators, adventurers and speculators all, play the game more or less well.
The other driver of events is coffee itself, a perfect drug for the traders who decide to make a market for it.
There is no heroic shamus, no one to navigate between high society and low and bring out the truth. The weak lose everything; the ruthless get rich and still live in fear and regret.
ISBN: 0-375-50854-6
So wrote clew in Fiction (21st c.). | TrackBack