Armadillo

In Armadillo, present-day London serves as the milieu for another of William Boyd’s anhedonic, obsessive protagonists, one Lorimer Black. An ace claims adjuster who suffers from insomnia, tortured self-consciousness, and impeccable style, Black spends the novel trying to untangle a labyrinthine insurance scam and capture an impossibly beautiful (and married) actress. With a little help from an ensemble of eccentric, self-absorbed schemers, Boyd (Brazzaville Beach, The Blue Afternoon) employs two parallel genres — medium-boiled detective fiction and doomed romance — that mesh nicely, if not rivetingly, in this take on the slippery pursuit of security and identity. B-