I felt like a fool. I had thought that The Thieves of Manhattan was a novel—that the real deception would lie in the word memoir on the book jacket. But Jed Roth had switched names and was somehow setting me up to make it seem as if I had written a memoir after all. “Everything will fall out just as it has been planned. It will all happen as it was written, Ian,” I remembered Roth telling me. I hadn’t understood what he had been saying. Now I feared that I had a pretty good idea; everything that had happened in the book was starting to happen to me. But how true could the book really be? The tattooed thug in the Rusty James jacket didn’t look like any librarian I’d ever met, but he sure looked like a hooligan. And he spoke exactly the way Roth had written him: Ay? Ay? Wot you said? How’s that soun’ like a good idea? Which had come first, I wondered, the actual hooligan or the one on the page? Was the woman in my apartment Iola Jaffe, the foul-mouthed septuagenarian manuscript appraiser?
What do You think about The Thieves Of Manhattan (2010)?
