An Exquisite Corpse

When the Cuban painter Wifredo Lam turns up dead in his Greenwich Village studio, the investigation takes Detective Sergeant John J. O'Connell and his team from Chinatown's underworld to Spanish Harlem's gangland in search of a killer who left a grotesque calling card. Suspicion soon falls on the tight-knit circle of Surrealist refugees who fled Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II. Did one of their bizarre parlor games turn deadly? Set in the sexually liberated New York art worid of the 1940s, populated by European artists in exile and the young Americans itching to take over the avant-garde, Harrison's tale is an amalgam of truth and invention. That turbulent era's creative ferment is the backdrop for a desperate crime and its lethal consequences.