Life Among Giants

This ambitious, energetic novel from Roorbach (Big Bend) has something for everyone—steamy sex, rock stars, ballet stars, professional football, a dysfunctional family, an unsolved murder, and a complicated revenge plot. The narrator, David (Lizard) Hockmeyer, is a giant himself, a former high school football player who's almost seven feet tall. His parents were shot in front of him when he was a teen, and he and his troubled, bipolar sister Kate have been obsessed for decades with finding the killers. Lizard and Kate live in Connecticut near a celebrated Swedish ballerina who calls herself Sylphide after the classic ballet and is the widow of Dabney, a flamboyant British rocker who died in a car crash. (Improbably, Dabney is already a big star in America in the early 1960s, before the Beatles and the British invasion.) In the end, Lizard and Sylphide's lives intersect in more ways than either of them could have imagined.