Expectation: A Francesca Fruscella Mystery

by Jeffrey DeShell

On the surface a murder mystery—a detective’s search for the killer of five people in Denver— Expectation is also, among other things, a meditation on the relationship between language and music.

In his newest novel, Jeffrey DeShell draws on the musical innovations of Arnold Schoenberg—by turns traditional, serial, and atonal—to inform his grammar and language. Moving progressively through specific Schoenberg compositions, DeShell complicates the surface of his text into lyrical derivatives, all the while drawing us into a murder mystery like no other as Detective Francisca Fruscella pursues both the killer and her own complicated personal history.

By turns rapturous, rigorous, and gripping, Expectation is a thriller of another kind—and a bold venture to the limits of the mystery genre and language itself.

120 pages, Paperback

First published September 10, 2013

About the author

Jeffrey DeShell is the author of four novels: Peter: An (A)Historical Romance (Starcherone 2006), The Trouble with Being Born (FC2 2008), S & M and In Heaven Everything is Fine (FC2) and a critical book, The Peculiarity of Literature: An Allegorical Approach to Poe’s Fiction. He has co-edited two collections of fiction by American women, Chick-Lit I: Postfeminist Fiction and Chick-Lit II: No Chick Vics (FC2), and was a Fulbright Teaching Fellow in Budapest, Hungary, 1999-2000. He has taught in Northern Cyprus, the American Midwest and was on the faculty of the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College. He is currently an associate professor and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Reviews

[Walter Polashenski · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked the premise, the set up of the story. And the night scene, drinking scotch and listening to music really worked. The the final chapters of dissonance were really a struggle. And the solution came too easily; too much described and not shown. Even though I suspect some of that was intentional, I was disappointed. Still worth the read.

[ipsit · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps one of the most under-accessed ways a text can take on the feel of the meticulousness of a certain kind of crime is to have the form of the book do as much work as the words themselves. You see so much fetishization of the maniacal rituals often associated with crimes like serial murder, but so often works of art made in their image lack any kind of meticulous artifice themselves, relying instead on gore and putridity to drive the feeling home.

While Jeffrey Deshell’s Expectation is presented up front as a murder mystery, the matter itself is a shell for the author’s predilection for totally reconfiguring the possibilities of what a form can be. This time, Deshell chooses to mate detective fiction with Austrian expressionist composer Arnold Schoenberg. The formal constraint breaks the proceeding investigation into riffs, so that layer by layer we are led into a search that seems to be going nowhere. Crime scenes bleed into dossiers bleed into conversations, sending the plot of the book inward as if on a search for itself. The deeper we get, and the more the avenues of investigation are folded over onto one another, the more different sorts of windows are opened up.

[Brandon Figliolino · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very good book! It's construction and language shifts reminded me of Arthouse. Highly recommend!