exactly when it’s supposed to. You can hear “pins drop” as secrets are revealed and the irrational murderer is exposed as having a rationale, and we end up with a happy kiss of newlyweds—literally. In other words, nothing much is a surprise and the accomplishment of this manages to require over four hundred pages. Part of the reason for this is that the characters, as they often do on the boob tube, repeat details of the crime to each other as if they were never really there or, more likely, the writer isn’t sure that the audience will remember what they’ve read. This is literature as a way to pass time, entertaining but never threatening to shake your view of reality. Like many best-selling crime novels, I Am Your Judge is about the comfortable predictability of the crime novel rather than the disorienting horror of murder. J. Madison Davis Palmyra, Virginia Edna O’Brien. The Little Red Chairs. Boston. Little, Brown. 2016. 320 pages. What if? What if Radovan Karadžić—the mastermind of the infamous forty-four-month Siege of Sarajevo in which 11,541 Sarajevans perished—what if Karadžić did not in the war’s aftermath go into hiding for a decade in Serbia, as he is thought to have done? Also, what if he did not there grow a white beard and play the role of “new age” physician , specializing in the treatment of sexual disorders, as reported? What if he was not arrested in Belgrade, as, indeed, he was? What if, instead, he went to Ireland? Then what? Celebrated Irish writer Edna O’Brien tells us in her latest, oddest, and yet strangely compelling novel. Her story starts in a “freezing, backwater ” Irish village, whose settled, edge-ofmodernity rhythms are suddenly disrupted by the arrival of a mysterious, white-bearded stranger. Dressed in black, he looks like a holy man. He talks poetry, talks mysticism, talks medicine, and offers to the publican whom he initially meets a business card that reads Healer and Sex Therapist. He calls himself Dr. Vladimir Dragan , and, when first asked, he says he’s from Montenegro. However, later, when pressed by a garda (policeman), he says he was born in Alexandria, and his name is common in Transylvania. “Is it related to Dracula?” the garda asks. The novel’s other main character is Fidelma McBride, the attractive, fortyyear -old wife of a draper. Her life, like her village, is in a maddening stasis at the time of the doctor’s arrival. Not long ago, her high-end, high-fashion boutique was shuttered. She had incurred debts, which angered and overwhelmed her sixtyyear -old husband. The two are childless, and that’s the biggest emptiness of all in Fidelma’s life. Before long, of course, Fidelma is impregnated by the doctor—in the oldest of old-fashioned ways. And, then, just after that, he is arrested by international police and uncovered for the demon he is—the fugitive mastermind of the Siege of Sarajevo, the man known worldwide as the Beast of Bosnia (historically, Karadžić). That’s just the beginning of O’Brien’s alternative history, a story that blends conventional history with romance and homage to Bram Stoker. Yes, let’s not forget that Dracula’s author was an Irishman, as it will be helpful in understanding O’Brien’s strange, compelling, what if? of a novel. John Cussen Edinboro University Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer. La Superba. Trans. Michele Hutchison. Dallas, Texas. Deep Vellum. 2016. 400 pages. Anti-Europeans will see this extraordinary book as a knowing critique of a spoiled, corrupt, and quarrelsome lot of countries; pro-Europeans will admire its wit and its love of place and history. Inevitably, some will dislike its cruel mockery of intellectual and moral ambitions and its bizarre take on sex and growing old, all of which forms part of a whole, abundantly rich in provocative thought. The book is set up as a “literary” work, a novel of letters, elegantly penned by “Ilja Pfeijffer,” a Dutch exile in Genoa, to his “dear friend” and publisher in Amsterdam . The letters recount an interlinked series of short stories drawn...