Double the pleasure, double the suspense and fun–that’s the case, at least, when you’re reading Laura Resnick’s humorous urban fantasy novel about doppelgangers, or doubles, Doppelgangster. Aspiring actress Esther Diamond stars in Resnick’s series, working at restaurants and doing other part-time jobs between acting gigs. She’s friends with a sorcerer named Max who owns a bookstore dealing in rare and antique books, and helps him fight the supernatural Evil that always seems to be just below the surface of New York City’s streets, just waiting to bubble up and make itself known.
The restaurant Esther usually works in between her acting gigs is Bella Stella’s. It’s a mob hangout for the Gambello family, though sometimes the Corvinos, a rival mob family, dine there. This doesn’t go over well with her boyfriend, Detective Lopez, who is a cop and has warned her it’s too dangerous to work there. She and the other waiters and waitresses also sing for their tips, and the better they sing, the larger their tips. While waiting tables one night, and singing for the over-three-hundred-pound Chubby Charlie Chiccante (who often asks for Esther to be his waitress because he likes her singing, and he likes to hit on her), he babbles a terror-induced story to her about having been cursed by his “doppio,” the Italian word for double. He tells her that this means he’ll die before the night’s over.
As he’s speaking to Esther, she worries that Chubby Charlie is talking so crazily that he might be having a heart attack, a stroke, or a series of mini-strokes. She thinks of phoning an ambulance, but then Chubby Charlie is shot to death right before her eyes. She doesn’t see who the killer is, but that doesn’t stop the police from questioning her at length about the murder. The shot came from outside Bella Stella’s, but that should be impossible, because Chubby Charlie had been eating in a part of Stella’s away from the window. The bullet would have had to curve to have killed him, a la the “magical” bullet that killed Kennedy.
Then, upon leaving Bella Stella’s, Esther and Lucky (a mob figure who–though he is a “retired” mob hit man–is a friend of Esther’s and wants to find out who is behind the killings to prevent an all-out war between the Gambellos and the Corvinos) walk together and see someone who looks exactly like Chubby Charlie headed into the restaurant. He asks Esther if she’ll be waiting on his table and singing for him, but she says she’s just leaving. He talks about being very hungry, also. Esther begins to believe that perhaps what had seemed to be the ramblings of a man who was undergoing mini-strokes may have been the truth.
This is only the start of a string of strange mob deaths that happen in Doppelgangster. What Esther, Max, and Lucky really want to do is to learn who is creating the doppelgangers, and to prevent any more deaths from occurring by stopping the person any way they can. The suspects run the gamut from other crime figures who might have something to gain or have revenge as a motive, to a thrice-widowed woman whose deceased husbands include men from both the Gambello and Corvino mob families.
I got a kick out of reading Dopplegangster. It is an urban fantasy that has many laugh-inducing moments, and enough twists and turns to keep the reader guessing until late into the book who is behind the scenes, the puppetmaster pulling the murderous “doppelgangster’s” strings. The novel combines Esther’s struggles to maintain her romance with Detective Lopez with her desires to become a successful actress and to figure out who’s behind the murders of mobsters. Can she find out, though, before she finds herself targeted by her own doppelganger?
Doppelgangster is a novel that will hold the interest of anyone who enjoys the urban fantasy genre. What made me like it was the author’s three-dimensional main characters, the likability of Esther, Max, Lopez, and Lucky, and how Esther deals with and attempts to resolve the many conflicting emotions and events in her life. She doesn’t let the fact that she is Jewish and Lopez is Catholic stop her from trying to establish a relationship with him, nor the fact that he is rooted in a world of practicality and the letter of the law, whereas she knows that Evil often has an occult base, and has to be defeated by using magical means, if necessary. My final verdict? Doppelgangster is a pretty cool, fun novel, a good way to spend a few hours being entertained with enough plot twists to keep it very interesting to the very end. It’s a great start to the Esther Diamond series, and I look forward to reading more of Laura Resnick’s novels in the future.
