A good, solid marriage is surely among the subjects that sound least promising for a novel. Yet in The Beggar's Pawn, John L'Heureux (The Medici Boy) manages to forge a gripping story around David and Maggie Holliss's happiness, which destabilizes the people in their lives.
David, a Stanford literature professor coming up on retirement, and Maggie, a scholar turned faculty spouse, meet Reginald Parker while out walking their dog, Dickens. Reginald, an aspiring novelist, is renting a guest cottage from another Stanford professor. For years the Hollisses and Reginald stick with exchanging pleasantries whenever they meet, but that changes the day Reginald dives to save Dickens from a UPS truck. Maggie, who was out with the dog at the time, brings Reginald into her house to tend to his wounds; "You have everything," he observes while looking out the window at the Hollisses' swimming pool. When Maggie tells him to let her know "if there is ever anything we can do to thank you," Reginald has a ready answer: he wants to borrow some money.
As The Beggar's Pawn, the final novel by L'Heureux, who died in 2019, proceeds, Reginald becomes an increasingly intrusive presence in the Hollisses' life. The novel's closing-in quality is compounded when the Hollisses weather a health scare and their entitled children descend on their Palo Alto home. The Beggar's Pawn has a thriller's delicious foreboding, but at heart its concerns are philosophical. Among them: the obligations of the privileged and whether having money can coexist with godliness. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer