Overview

From the LA Times Book Prize-winning author comes a suspenseful and mind-bending novel about Eldon Chance, a forensic neuropsychiatrist at the end of his rope – now a Hulu TV series starring Hugh Laurie and Gretchen Moi. Chance is a dark story about psychiatric mystery, sexual obsession, fractured identities, and terrifyingly realistic violence; a tale told amid the back streets of California's Bay Area, far from the cleansing breezes of the ocean. The antihero of this book, Dr. Eldon Chance, a neuropsychiatrist, is a man primed for spectacular ruin. Into Dr. Chance's blighted life walks Jaclyn Blackstone, the abused, attractive wife of an Oakland homicide detective, a violent and jealous man. Jaclyn appears to be suffering from a dissociative identity disorder. In time, Chance will fall into bed with her; or is it with her alter ego, the voracious and volatile Jackie Black? The not-so-good doctor, despite his professional training, isn't quite sure and soon finds himself up against her husband, Raymond, a formidable and dangerous adversary. Meanwhile, Chance also meets a young man named D, a self-styled, streetwise philosopher skilled in the art of the blade. It is around this trio of unique and dangerous individuals that long-guarded secrets begin to unravel, obsessions grow, and the doctor's carefully arranged life comes to the brink of implosion. Chance is a twisted, harrowing, and impossible-to-put-down head trip through the fun house of fate; it's not pretty, it's not sweet, but it is disturbing and unforgettable.

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9780857301628

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Reviews

Chance is ambitious and provocative, complex in construction and in its prose -- Rowena * Murder, Mayhem and More * 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 * Chance takes place in the twilit world of noir, where people and things are never what they seem...For all the mayhem - its ending is delicately funny * 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 * Brilliant and cerebral psychological thriller * Publisher's Weekly *

Author Information

Kem Nunn is a third-generation Californian whose previous novels include The Dogs of Winter, Pomona Queen, Unassigned Territory, and Tapping the Source, which was the basis of the film Point Break. Tijuana Straits won the Los Angeles Times Book Award. His latest novel, Chance, was recently made into a major TV series starring Hugh Laurie and Gretchen Mol. He lives in Southern California, where he also writes screenplays for television and film including John from Cincinnati, Deadwood and Sons of Anarchy.

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