Jeffrey Moore’s second novel has all the ingredients of an entertaining, seductive mystery. Our naïve hero, Noel, equally blessed and plagued by synaesthesia, a condition that causes voices to appear as colours and shapes and gives him an unerasable memory, befriends the devastatingly handsome artist and womanizer Norval. Enter Samira, a Middle Eastern beauty trying to escape her former identity as an actress.

While Noel harbours a secret love for Samira, she can’t help falling for Norval because she likes her men bad. The three of them are brought together by an eccentric neurologist, Dr. Vorta, who is helping to cure Noel’s mother of her Alzheimer’s. Despite this ripe material for a noir thriller, Moore seems to have other intentions for his novel, which is too bad.

Distracting from the central story from the onset is the novel’s postmodern layered structure. The novel is narrated as the fictional account of a ghost writer hired by Dr. Vorta, who in turn begins to add his own superfluous footnotes to the book until he dies near the end (not soon enough). For good measure, several of the characters’ diaries and a scrapbook of newspaper articles are inserted as well.

When the long-awaited character interactions do take place, they’re bogged down by an enormous amount of dialogue that often resembles a polite talk-show interview whose main purpose is to fill in background information. This, despite the fact that Moore repeatedly displays his ability to draw characters through subtle gestures. When we first meet Norval, he’s in the bedroom of his most recent conquest: “He looked at himself in the mirror, seemingly in approval, brushed back his long wavy chestnut locks. What’s her name again?”

Another skill not fully realized in The Memory Artists is Moore’s knack for dropping intriguing clues and evidence into the narrative. Noel finds Samira topless in Dr. Vorta’s lab; Samira discovers a vial of white powder labeled “K” among Norval’s things. Is Dr. Vorta taking advantage of Samira? Is Norval a Ketamine junkie? We don’t know, are left in suspense, and although Moore pulls it all together for the finale, there’s too much slack in the novel to give it that pleasurable punch at the end.