Unlike Nikolai Gogol's short story about losing a precious overcoat, David Finkle's The Man with the Overcoat is about a handsome overcoat given to Skip Gerber as he exits a New York City office elevator, by a man who then just walks away. This event begins a strange and perplexing story worthy of Gogol's absurdist worlds.
Skip, a real estate lawyer preoccupied with work, accepts the "unusually heavy, thundercloud-grey overcoat" without thinking about it. He decides to return it--but how? Finkle (People Tell Me Things) charts the weird and fluky adventures that Skip has over the course of the next 24 hours, as the lawyer tries to solve this mystery. The many peculiar, chance events "were cumulatively too coincidental to be coincidental."
He finds a business card in one pocket, which leads him to a high-rise office with no one there, but the doorman says there are "people in and out of here all the time." A scribbled note in another pocket has an address and the initials "amS." This leads him to a now non-existent building where a 19th-century financier, Ambrosius Manley Sturtivant, once worked. His cab driver tells him he has brought other fares here, who wore overcoats just like Skip's. He soon feels like he's "been thrust into an old movie. A thriller." Maybe it's a Hitchcock film or a bizarre Maltese Falcon. Either way, The Man with the Overcoat is a very entertaining and quirky novel. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher