The Spectre of Alexander Wolf opens with the narrator telling us the story of the time he murdered a man many years earlier. It was in the context of war, and he was a teenage soldier, but murder is the word he uses. This killing has weighed on him ever since. Now, all these years later, he is a journalist in Paris. He comes across a book in English by a writer named Alexander Wolf. The book contains three short stories, the last of which is called "The Adventure in the Steppe" and describes, down to every detail, the murder the narrator committed, from the perspective of the killed man. Our narrator realizes his victim is still alive, and seeks to find him. It takes him a while to track down Alexander Wolf, and in the end he finds him almost by accident. In the meantime other events have taken place in the narrators life, and the reader starts to sense an unlikely coincidence, or set of coincidences. Even as I was sure I had "solved" this book, the end still shocked me. There are other flaws in the book, but the end was perfect.
Before I read The Spectre of Alexander Wolf, I read Casey McQuiston's 2021 novel, One Last Stop. When I read their Red, White & Royal Blue last year, I wrote, "There were all kinds of bits in this book that were just a little too far-fetched..." and I can say that if I thought that was far-fetched, I didn't know what I had coming in One Last Stop. The book is batshit. SPOILERS FOLLOW.
One Last Stop is a queer romance about two women who meet on the subway, but one of them is actually from the 1970s having gotten stuck in (or out of??) time on the subway in the great blackout of 1977 and she's just been riding the Q train for 45 years (without aging) until she meets the protagonist and they fall in love and she's able to retrieve some of her memories. Alexander Wolf had some improbable coincidences, but One Last Stop really tests our credulity (beyond whatever credulity we've already allowed for the premise itself) when it (of course) turns out there's a connection between the subway girl and the protagonist's uncle, whom her mother has been searching for (nowhere near New York, and no, he also never lived there) since 1973. This book was easy to read and kind of fun, but I also kind of hated it. However, I don't think I can be bothered to get into my various gripes with it now. If quasi supernatural queer romance is your thing, and you're not too put off by the hyper-contemporary (I suspect lots of references in this book will feel dated by 2023), you might enjoy this.
* There are some definite flaws in StoryGraph's recommendations. For one, it suggested to me a book that I've already read, which for some reason got imported as an audio book, but nonetheless it had on record as a book I'd read. It also recommends some books in French, which I could maybe manage, and more bizarrely a book by Nicole Krauss translated into Hungarian, which I definitely couldn't (though I do feel they're picking up on something about me in making this recommendation).
