A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK - "A cut-throat Russian businessman, two ruthlessly ambitious and beautiful young women and a scheme to make unlimited amount of cash--and voil , you're caught up in the momentum of a great story. . . . Magnificent." --The New York Times "The Same River Twice is the tale of beautiful losers living on the edge. . . . A] lushly cinematic mystery . . . for the highbrow set--those who take their thrillers with a dash of art history." --Minneapolis Star-Tribune
Odile M vel is a French clothing designer, her American husband, Max, an independent filmmaker. When Odile agrees to buy a selection of ceremonial May Day banners in the Soviet Union and deliver the contraband to Paris she earns a new job description: smuggler.
Soon her fellow courier disappears, her apartment is ransacked, and her friend's houseboat is firebombed. While Max has no inkling of Odile's dealings, he finds himself embroiled in a baffling film world mystery of his own. As their escapades deepen and their deceptions multiply, Odile and Max discover their secrets are connected--endangering not only their marriage but their lives.
Industry Reviews
"A cut-throat Russian businessman, two ruthlessly ambitious and beautiful young women and a scheme to make unlimited amount of cash--and voil�, you're caught up in the momentum of a great story. . . . Magnificent." --The New York Times
"The Same River Twice is a philosophical entertainment doubling as a riveting, unconventional thriller. . . . Dazzling . . . shimmering, charged." --The Boston Globe
"The Same River Twice is the tale of beautiful losers living on the edge. . . . [A] lushly cinematic mystery . . . for the highbrow set--those who take their thrillers with a dash of art history." --Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"It's too bad that Alfred Hitchcock isn't still around to direct a movie adaptation of this kaleidoscope of a novel of intrigue." --St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"The Same River Twice could almost be filmed straight from the page. . . . [Mooney's] up-to-date stylistic concerns, art world experience, and nods to 1980s-style branding lend an indefinable chic to a solid thriller." --The New York Review of Books
"A riveting tale of intrigue and sexual attraction with the Russian mafia lurking in the shadows." --Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"The Same River Twice is that very rare literary beast--a literary thriller. . . . Patricia Highsmith couldn't have done it better." --Jay McInerney
"Mooney writes sophisticated, unstrained prose. . . . Having spent thirty years as senior editor of Art in America magazine, [Mooney] has honed a penetrating eye. . . . The best passages lay the art world open like a gleaming pomegranate." --The Plain Dealer
"A tour de force. . . . A taut and lively literary thriller that mingles the worlds of Paris and New York art collectors and filmmakers with a seamy and violent criminal underworld as it explores the nature of art, fate, and inevitability." --Library Journal
"Read this stunning novel once for the pleasure of the hunt, and twice for the treasure between the lines: the pounding of the human heart, the intricate tick-tock as the gears of destiny accelerate. Mooney is a magician, and his new books sparkles like a mysterious city." --Jayne Anne Phillips
"Mooney's women [are] among the most shimmeringly intelligent in contemporary fiction." --Philadelphia Inquirer
"Mooney is a risk-taking adventurer in novelistic possibilities." --San Francisco Chronicle
"A superbly written and wonderfully paced novel, rich with mystery and foreign intrigue." --Oscar Hijuelos
"A novelist with a gift for razor-sharp dialogue, for the brilliantly chiseled sentence and the memorably vivid scene." --Newsday
"Rich, multilayered, powerfully unsettling. . . . [The Same River Twice] succeeds on a number of different levels: as a page-turning mystery in which conceptual art meets the scientific vanguard of stem-cell research and as a meditation on the trusts and betrayals of marriage, on truth and illusion and the relation of each to artistic creativity. . . . The whole comes together in a morally ambiguous manner that seems equally surprising, disturbing and inevitable." --Kirkus Reviews
"[Mooney] is one of those rare writers whose take on the world is so original that one avidly reads whatever he chooses to write about." --Chicago Tribune
