A Serial Killer Walks Into a Bookstore

A Serial Killer Walks Into a Bookstore

The Last Reader

I’m just sitting down at a table at the back of the bookstore café with a stack of books and an iced coffee, and the woman at the next table, thirtyish, dreadlocks, librarian glasses, nose ring, leans over and says, “Skip that one.”

With her chin she points to the paperback with the bright purple cover at the top of my stack.

I’m talking about the new thriller by a Scandinavian writer everyone swears I have to read. His last name has an Ø in it; I can only vaguely guess how to pronounce it. I’m a little embarrassed to be seen with it. But I’m thinking I can skim the first chapter and the back cover and have something to say the next time I have to talk to my wife’s aunt Christine.

Christine lives in Upper Marion, happily retired, with labradoodles, and belongs to four book groups: Classics, Spirituality, Oprah, and Murders in Oslo. When she sees me, she gets the old cartoon spirals in her eyes. She practically licks her lips. The Writer in the Family.

“Here’s how it goes,” my new friend says. “There’s an old, bitter mystery writer in New York who wants to end it all. So he writes a book about an old, bitter mystery writer who publishes a book with a bright purple cover and then, whenever he sees someone reading it, follows them home and murders them. And then he actually starts doing it. In broad daylight. Every time he sees someone reading the book, on the subway, in Central Park, wherever—­he follows them home and kills them. Not trying to cover his tracks. Fingerprints everywhere, the clearest MO you can imagine.”

I look down at the cover, and there it is: A Detective’s Easy Afternoon.

“But then, of course, he never gets caught. He calls a friend of his on the force, the source for a lot of his research, and says, ‘It’s me, I’ve turned into a serial killer,’ and his friend doesn’t believe him. His friend says, ‘You need to take a vacation.’ So he goes out to his house in Sag Harbor, takes long walks on the beach, and everywhere he goes he sees that bright purple cover. He can’t stop himself. He gets invited to speak at a book group in a nursing home and brings a plate of strychnine brownies. Finally he stages his own death, leaving his book as the only clue.”

“It’s like Paul Auster crossed with Patricia Highsmith.”

“Like Agatha Christie crossed with Borges.”

She’s been leaning over the back of her chair, in the posture of “Excuse me, I don’t mean to intrude,” but now she does the most wonderful thing: She turns her chair to face mine. She’s wearing a red sundress, she has ivy vines climbing up one arm, she crosses her legs and leans forward and says, “I think the only way you could make it work is if the author actually did go around New York killing people.”

“Even by today’s industry standards,” I say, “that’s a long shot.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she says. “Anyway, do you still want it? I have to go; I’ll take it back to the table if you want. Seriously. That César Aira novel is the bomb.”

When she gets up, and look, I’m not ashamed to say it, I’m following her every movement, the Paris Review tote bag slung casually over one shoulder, the minute adjustment of her coiled dreads, the way she smooths her skirt, the flickers of muscle in her calves, and then the man watching from the corner seat at the high table facing the window, with his cropped gray hair and prominent earlobes and faded, slightly shiny black suit over a blue polo shirt. She holds the book loosely, distractedly, in her left hand while checking her phone with her right, drifting toward the entrance, and he stands up, silently sucking the last drops out of his iced coffee, but then she checks herself and slides it neatly atop the stack at the first table, unmissable, a purple column, and steps into a pane of sunlight, reaching up to scratch the middle of her back, pulling the earbuds from her tote bag, and walks off toward Elizabeth Street, and he sits down again, and we both watch her, our reader, our last reader, watch her as she goes.