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REVIEW:
A callow young man takes a seemingly mundane office job and gets more than he bargained for in this absorbing thriller. There's bound to be something fishy about a job opening when the interviewer starts out by asking about your "belief structure." But it's economically stagnant 1976 and recent grad Tim Conolly isn't getting many nibbles on his resume, so he accepts the junior-management position with RDG, a California manufacturer of medical tests. Half the job, of course, is navigating office politics and personality clashes, a challenge that becomes considerably easier after Tim's mysterious mentor-a member of a shadowy cabal known as the Committee-gives him a magic key that lets him see his coworkers' hidden emotional states as colored auras. (Remember, the '70s were the decade of the mood ring.) Once he gets used to the headaches, Tim learns to read the auras of the people around him-green means contentment, blue means anger, yellow means suicidal self-loathing-and even to project his emotions into other minds. Those skills come in handy when two crises erupt. The first is the murder of Tim's mother, which he sets out to avenge when the perp gets off scot-free. The second is a plot hatched by a conspiracy within the Committee to use poisoned heroin to rid America of its drug addicts. The auras might sound a bit goofy, but Murphy deploys them in a restrained, deadpan style as a muted element of magical realism. They serve to highlight what is actually a subtle study of workplace group dynamics, and of the grief and rage that roil Tim's family in the wake of tragedy. The author's prose is taut but full of feeling and psychological nuance-it reveals his characters' souls more vividly than their auras do. A well-crafted, imaginative tale.
Kirkus Discoveries, Nielsen Business Media, 770 Broadway, New York, NY 10003
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