"With a thrust of her hips, she met me in a way I'd always wanted to be met."

Unfortunately, Renee Knowles is killed before the postcoital bliss has had a chance to wear off, and our narrator, San Francisco picture framer Danny Kestrel, is the cops' top suspect. What starts off like a classic wrong-man thriller turns out to be that--and about 15 other things, each successively more bizarre and compelling.

Nisbet, a cult favorite among the French and other noir cognoscenti, pulls out all the stops here, combining genres and subgenres like a coked-up Julia Child tossing ingredients into a bouillabaisse. It turns out that Knowles, an antiques picker for the rich and famous, had stumbled upon the well-traveled and seriously bloody trail of the Syracuse Codex, a Roman Empire artifact already being sought by a hardy band of fortune hunters right out of The Maltese Falcon.

Danny, like Sam Spade, lands in the middle of this motley crew and, inevitably, is caught up in the chase. What is this book? Is it The Da Vinci Code with less faux piety and more Hammet style; a bibliothriller dirtied up for the noir crowd; a full-frontal satire of the San Francisco art scene; a Wild at Heart--like love story written by a multisyllabic Barry Gifford? Well, it's all of those, but most important, it's an over-the-top piece of bravura storytelling that grabs you in its helter-skelter narrative frenzy and won't let go.