The first chapter of Colin Harrison's noir novel The Havana Room charges ahead with such blistering immediacy and inspiration that it's easy to imagine him writing it in one long, bleary-eyed session, with his fingers never leaving the keyboard. In 40 pages, he details one man's precipitous drop from a cozy Park Avenue perch to the depths of seedy anonymity, a freefall executed so swiftly and resolutely that it might as well have been literal. With great economy of language, Harrison outlines a chain of events that lead his hero into the corridors of real power in upper-crust Manhattan, where wrath is exercised with such brutal civility that a man's life can be ruined with a boardroom handshake. Too bad, then, about the so-so novel attached to this masterful short story, which promises to plumb deeper into the secret vices of the city's old-school elite, but gets sidetracked by Long Island real estate. Though Harrison's descriptive abilities are still formidable and his damaged characters more touching than they initially appear, the bulk of the book is all too sobering, like the dull hangover after an especially vivid dream. More controlled, though less delectably perverse, than his previous novel Afterburn, The Havana Room opens with Bill Wyeth, a moneyed New York City law partner, describing what he calls "the night my old life ended." A late flight and Thai delivery are all it takes to set off a sequence of events that accidentally kills the young son of a banking giant and leads the innocent Bill to lose his livelihood, his wife, and his boy over the course of a few months. Landing hard in a ratty walk-up on 36th Street, Bill becomes a regular at an old-fashioned Manhattan steakhouse, where he observes the comings and goings of the city's prominent men from the lowliest table in the house. Eventually, he attracts the interest of the restaurant's alluring manager, Allison Sparks, and he inquires about the inconspicuous doorway leading to the Havana Room, which hosts well-heeled customers by invitation only. Bill's curiosity is satisfied when Allison recruits him to broker an 11th-hour real-estate swap for her current lover, but that opportunity leads to a thorny mass of intrigue and danger. Working on behalf of his new client, Bill runs into all sorts of nefarious characters and goons, but the mystery resolves itself in surprisingly poignant, even sentimental ways. In spite of his flair for creative debauchery–witness the first-ever evidence of fugu-fish fetishism–Harrison neglects his strong early statements on power and masculinity for a routine, though consistently engaging, potboiler. The disconnect between the opening chapter and the rest of the book suggests an author who lost his galvanizing sense of purpose and approached the remaining pages as a problem that needed to be solved. But for someone with Harrison's gifts, even struggles and mishaps can be riveting.