Sleep Tight in New York City

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 4 JUL 2016

In the last of the Tompkins Trilogy, David Campion, an obsessive-compulsive New York City librarian with a Derek Jeter fixation, wants to marry his news-reporter fianc e, but he feels compelled first to resolve the circumstances of his family history. When David was an infant, his mother while holding David in her arms was struck and killed by a train in David's hometown of Elizabeth, N.J. In a scattered narrative voice, David recounts his visits to Elizabeth, which he keeps secret from his fianc e the way another man might an infidelity. As his behavior becomes increasingly bizarre he acts on the compulsion to reach for a police officer's gun and ends up in jail David emerges as less a man struggling with his past and more one suffering from mental illness. Malone's storytelling has the same quality of listless meandering as his protagonist. Yet David's fixation with his roots, seedy Betsy Town, and the tragedy that spared his life, lend poignancy to a novel of flailing through crisis and emerging out the other side. (BookLife)