In each person, a world of mystery

Sunstroke

A Novel

Jesse Kellerman

Putnam: 368 pp., $24.95

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HOW well can one person ever know another? The parent who knows his teenager to be a courteous, quiet student could be harboring a bingeing alcoholic, the devoted wife supporting a cheating husband, a trusting employer promoting an embezzling employee. In today’s jittery times, author Charles W. Chesnutt’s words still apply: “The workings of the human heart are the profoundest mystery of the universe,” he wrote in the 1901 novel “The Marrow of Tradition.” “One moment they make us despair of our kind, and in the next, we see in them the reflection of the divine image.”

Chesnutt’s sentiments resonate throughout Jesse Kellerman’s debut novel, “Sunstroke.” Gloria Mendez, Kellerman’s protagonist, is a 36-year-old secretary leading what she thinks is an untethered existence. “By not weighing herself down with sentimentality, she was free to make changes in her life; free to accommodate another person, or two or three.” But the reader learns that Gloria’s life, save for a few friends and an ex-husband cop, is actually held in abeyance by her unrequited love for 56-year-old Carl Perreira, her emotionally elusive boss and owner of a novelty toy company. Gloria would do anything for Carl, so when he leaves her a note before going on a holiday in Mexico saying to take care of things, she takes it literally. Cutting short her own vacation to trek from West Hollywood to Carl’s Beverly Hills office in the aftermath of a major earthquake, she finds the office a shambles and a mysteriously garbled voicemail from Carl. She’s able to decipher that he was in an accident somewhere and that he’d call her at home. No call comes, and that sets her on a quest to find him.

Gloria’s dogged investigation leads her to the Mexican town of Agua Vivas, where Lt. Tito Fajardo breaks the bad news: Carl has died in an auto accident. Because his body was burned and his ID destroyed, the license plate on his Honda is the only link to his identity. Since Perreira had no known family, Gloria drives down the California coast to identify and claim the body. The journey stirs memories of Gloria’s troubled childhood, then a voice on a Spanish-language evangelical radio station warns, “Las puertas infierno tienen un olor dulce.” (The gates to hell have a sweet smell.) The words prove prophetic, for Gloria learns that Agua Vivas, its name evocative of a lush oasis and a vibrant lake, is now a sandblasted plain containing what some claim is Mexico’s largest cemetery. She also learns that, consistent with Mexican law, Carl has been cremated, a plastic urn of ashes all that remains.

Returning to Los Angeles with her pitiful bounty, Gloria becomes a bit unhinged, her natural orderliness giving way to a soul-deadening grief as she tries to be named executor of Carl’s estate to remain close to him. She goes to his apartment, first to clean up the earthquake damage but eventually to sleep on his bed and inhale his scent. She imagines herself holding him as he dies, “felt heat melting her skin, felt the shock of air on flesh and fascia and bone. Saw herself -- with him ... a shared heart -- that refused to blacken, despite the flames.”

Kellerman’s prose sings in these pages; his ability to make vivid the hamster wheel of grief is astounding. Vivid too is his dialogue. The cadences and hesitations are the mark of a playwright, which he is. Also compelling are flashbacks to Gloria’s childhood and relationships, which paint a portrait of a woman whose loneliness made her susceptible to Carl’s peculiar charms. Yet the narrative begins to sag under the grief and minutiae until Gloria, while opening Carl’s mail, discovers that her boss was a secret supporter of several charities and that he may have been connected to a Joseph Gerusha, owner of millions of dollars in securities. Was Carl somehow laundering money for Gerusha? Has he embezzled Gerusha’s funds, perhaps killing him and arranging to disappear in Mexico? And why does there seem to be no record of Carl or Gerusha predating the last 20 years? These questions compel Gloria to dig deeper into the life of a man who seemed to have every reason to hide who he really was and necessitate a harrowing return trip to Agua Vivas that may or may not bring her closer to the heart of Carl’s sad mystery.

“Sunstroke” is a finely written, sleekly plotted novel that, if relegated to the thriller category (perhaps his publisher’s attempt to link his work to that of the author’s famous mystery-writing parents, Jonathan and Faye Kellerman), may disappoint readers wanting more action or peril and prevent a much wider audience from enjoying the novel’s singular charms. Kellerman fils is working on a deeper level, and what he uncovers about the secrets people keep, about what is hidden and what is revealed, makes “Sunstroke” one of the brainier, more deeply felt debuts in recent years.

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Paula L. Woods, a frequent contributor to Book Review, is the author of the Charlotte Justice mystery series, including, most recently, “Strange Bedfellows.”