Book Review: Welcome to Yesterday

Reviewed By: Catherine Thompson - RAM

Welcome to Yesterday     Amazon US HC Amazon UK HC Amazon Canada HC
Ian Spiegelman
Class/Genre:   Mystery   Thriller
Miramax Books, $32.95 hardcover, 260 pages

“I’d been on the beat for six years before I managed to kill somebody.” So says gossip columnist Leon Koch at the opening of Welcome to Yesterday. The somebody in question is Kyle Prince, a notoriously drug-addicted talent agent. Koch learns of his apparent suicide from an anonymous phone call from a hysterical woman. Koch finds himself at the centre of an investigation, threatened with unemployment by Corporate, the entity that owns the newspaper for which he works, and threatened with death by the hysterical woman. Meanwhile, Koch is trying to learn the identity of the woman and figure out why she called him in the first place.

Welcome to Yesterday is a lot like the world in which it’s set, the world of entertainment: lots of style, little substance. I think that might be the point of it, however. Everywhere you turn, there are snappy noir-ish one-liners that paint incredible word-pictures: “His stride had a long, sharp grace that was hardly undercut by him zipping his fly”; “He laughed, coughing smoke, a cackle like throwing rocks at the walls of a cave.”

As a mystery, it falls rather flat. The investigation is perfunctory and peripheral; Koch isn’t an investigative journalist by any means, simply a hack out to slag off the “accounts” of whichever publicist didn’t invite him to the premiere or the pub-crawl afterwards. The ending is suitably gory and psychotic, even if it does seem to come out of left field. Sometimes you wonder if Spiegelman is trying too hard.

As stylish as it is, Welcome to Yesterday left me feeling unsatisfied, as if I’d been dragged out of the restaurant after the appetizers and before the main course.

Catherine Thompson - RAM

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Catherine Thompson - RAM