A review of David Orsini's SCHEMES, DISGUISES, and TRAPS

Review by Ben W. McClelland, The University of Mississippi

As the title hints, David Orsini’s novel SCHEMES, DISGUISES, & TRAPS is an exemplar of contemporary noir fiction. And he doesn’t disappoint. Set in Manhattan—and other posh spots around the globe—Orsini’s brand of noir doesn’t take place in the grunge of the urban underworld as earlier avatars of the hard-boiled school. Nor are his characters sleazy criminals, hookers, or cops from a lower class (except for Bryce Thompson, the tormented and tormenting, antagonistic perpetrator). Orsini’s story inhabits the mid-to-late twentieth century world of the urbane, super rich. The settings are fashionable Manhattan restaurants, elegant city apartments, New England compounds of the equestrian class, ornate European estates, and mountaintop or beachside resorts—all keenly rendered in fine literary wordsmithery. Orsini’s eye catches the smallest details of interiors and the grandest sweeps of the natural world, offering the reader vicariously a luxurious presence in the tense and fast-moving drama of sexual transgression, competitive gamesmanship, and destructive family intrigues, some promulgated between the sheets, others in the board room, or in wills and their controlling codicils.