Toronto native Tancred Palmieri has had many jobs in his career as a thief but none as intriguing as the one proposed by 50-ish heroin junkie Willow Azarian. Willow's billionaire father left millions to his five children, but he also left each a memento mori. Her siblings' mementos were a bottle of aquavit, a painting, a poem and a replica of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. Hers was a six-panel Momoyama-period Japanese screen, but with the final panel removed. Willow is convinced that these are clues that lead to a larger inheritance. She asks Tancred to steal the other four mementos so that she can solve the puzzle.
That Willow dies before Tancred can locate them is only one of the complications in The Hidden Keys, André Alexis's (Fifteen Dogs) philosophical mystery. The cast of colorful characters includes Willow's albino drug dealer and an assistant nicknamed Freud; Alexander von Würfel, the artist who designed some of the mementos; and Daniel Mandelshtam, Tancred's childhood friend and a Toronto detective. Once the reader meets a one-legged man known as the Colonel, this enjoyable novel's debt to Treasure Island becomes even clearer. The Hidden Keys is a novel about the roles fate and chance play in life, and the difficulty of knowing whether one's actions are honorable. As von Würfel states in one of the novel's many reflective moments, "When a man has so little idea what the consequences of an action will be, how can he know if he's doing good or not?" --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer