Death of the Black-Haired Girl

ROBERT STONE is one of the most eminent American novelists of his generation. He won the National Book Award in 1975 for his novel Dog Soldiers, and was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Death of the Black-Haired Girl is his eighth novel.

Robert Stone’s fast-paced new novel. . . takes as its presiding muse not Conrad or Graham Greene, but Nathaniel Hawthorne. . . His gift for orchestrating suspense and dramatic scenes — so vividly on display in “Damascus Gate,” his 1998 novel set in Jerusalem and Gaza — is deployed here with efficiency and élan. As is his talent for charting his characters’ psychological and spiritual longings. . . . The result is at once a Hawthorne-like allegory and a sure-footed psychological thriller.