Season of Lillian Dawes, The

While Katherine Mosby's cool, feline prose is entirely her own, careful readers will hear the faint echoes of Edith Wharton and Henry James in this beguiling second novel, The Season of Lillian Dawes. In the wake of some adolescent antics at his private school, Gabriel Gibbs, a member of an extended aristocratic family in a privileged segment of society in post-World War II New York, is expelled. He is sent to live on West Ninth Street with his older brother Spencer, a poet and wit, who a female acquaintance describes as "one of those tall, charming men you know would be absolutely useless in an emergency." Here he first learns of the mysterious Lillian Dawes, whose allure, like that of Max Beerbohm's femme fatale, Zuleika Dobson, rests in part on her beauty and vivacity and in part on her perplexing air of detachment. But Lillian is not as detached as she seems. Only after her sudden disappearance from the lives of Gabriel and Spencer does her own troubling quest come to light. The Season of Lillian Dawes is a novel of distinction, with acid Salingeresque dialogue balanced by elegiac renderings of Manhattan in the 1950s. --Regina Marler