Chasing shadows

Memories are at the core of Peter Abrahams’ exciting and out-of-the-ordinary 14th thriller, “Oblivion” -- memories and the human personalities shaped by them. Nick Petrov, the book’s protagonist, embodies a unique dilemma. A man who finds missing people for a living, he himself begins to disappear: A cerebral hemorrhage wipes out chunks of his recollection, even as he’s desperate to solve a case that’s key in some unknown way to his own professional and personal identities.

Petrov, a Russian American private investigator, lives in Los Angeles: city of improvised and alternate realities. Indeed, Petrov’s greatest true-life hit -- the capture, a decade earlier, of a Southern California serial killer -- was memorialized in a TV movie in which Petrov was portrayed by Armand Assante (with Kim Delaney as the female police detective the PI had an affair with).

Petrov’s brain trauma occurs about a fifth of the way into “Oblivion,” affording a complex sort of tension as he struggles to comprehend the meanings of things already known to the reader. He’s been hired, it seems, to find a missing teenage girl; is she a runaway, or has she met with foul play? Was the woman who hired him really the girl’s mother, or was she maybe her aunt, or her sister? Some of these things were ambiguous even before the detective’s trauma.

Elements of the book’s typography (such as half-vanished capital letters at the beginnings of chapters) cleverly evoke Petrov’s evaporating recall, in a text whose action moves swiftly from the San Fernando Valley to the Venice Beach canals and points north, south and east. As gripping as is “Oblivion’s” plot, which has its genre’s requisite share of action and menace, a large part of this affecting novel’s appeal lies in seeing Petrov -- aided sometimes by hallucinations of his late father -- rediscover the sensory and emotional joys of life.

Abrahams is especially good at evoking those joys, creating charming, convincing young people and believable scenes between parents and children. His funny and stout-hearted dogs (like Buster, who becomes Petrov’s assistant for a few hours) are unmatched by anyone’s, including Dashiell Hammett’s and Robert B. Parker’s. “Oblivion” is laced throughout with a wonderful sense of humor, a quality Petrov manifests more, the less he remembers. (“I’m a private investigator.” “Investigatin’ what?” “You tell me.”)

“Oblivion” is full of funny, touching and alarming surprises. A reader is never sure what this book’s quirky characters might say or see or do. The suspense is heightened by the contrast between the pre-traumatized and the new Petrov, who entertains such notions as: “Was it possible that while some connections in his mind had failed, others were now better than before?” Similarly, Petrov realizes there are at least two ways to skin a case: “Petrov preferred to work the scientific way, assembling the evidence until it formed a theory. But sometimes he could work the other way, beginning with understanding.... That was the nonscientific way; call it religious.”

As readers follow Petrov’s hunt to reclaim the past, they too may struggle to recall certain naggingly familiar memories, echoes of other works provoked by this evocative tale. A private eye’s greatest triumph memorialized in a movie -- haven’t Robert Crais and Michael Connelly also used that? A detective working against time and a fatal disease -- wasn’t that in a T. Jefferson Parker book? A man whose memory disappears as he tries to recapture it -- wasn’t that the premise of the recent movie “Memento”? But forget such quibbles. Remember this: Peter Abrahams is a wonderful writer. *