Gone

by Renata Adler

Black has it all. A renowned gemologist and former motorcycle racer turned Private Investigator, he’s a certified bachelor whose cooking isn’t confined to the kitchen. Look away and you’ll miss him tearing through the five boroughs on his liquid-cooled BMW bike or in his Maserati Quatroport. Life is good. Until the world’s largest black opal disappears. The owners, a consortium of former KGB turned mobsters, hire Black to recover the gem. His life will never be the same again. The hunt leads him from the comfort of his Upper East Side brownstone, smack into Montenegro, summer home to the Russian mafia; to the high-rolling casinos of Europe; to far away Australia, and then deep into the darkness that is North Korea. But Black’s not alone. The NYPD detective assigned to the caper, an exotic Algerian beauty, has a stake in the case and is along for the ride. Love. You can’t hide from it forever. Life may be precious. But the opal is worth more.

Hardcover

First published May 9, 2013

About the author

Born in Milan, Italy, Adler grew up in Danbury, Connecticut after her parents had fled Nazi Germany in 1933. After attending Bryn Mawr, The Sorbonne, and Harvard, she became a staff writer-reporter for The New Yorker. She later received her J.D. from Yale Law School, and an Honorary Doctorate of Laws from Georgetown University.

Adler’s essays and articles have been collected in Toward a Radical Middle (1969) and A Year in the Dark (1970), Reckless Disregard (1986), and Canaries in the Mineshaft (2001). Renata Adler is also the author of two successful novels Speedboat (1976) and Pitch Dark (1983). Both novels are composed of seemingly unconnected passages that challenge readers to find meaning. Like her nonfiction, Adler's novels examine the issues and mores of contemporary life.

In 1987, Adler was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. That same year, she received an honorary doctorate from Georgetown University. Her "Letter from Selma" has been published in the Library of America volume of Civil Rights Reporting. An essay from her tenure as film critic of The New York Times is included in the Library of America volume of American Film Criticism. In 2004, she served as a Media Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute.