A very clever and well-written thriller.

Couldn't get into it. ( )

The Caveman's Valentine is a murder mystery with a very singular protagonist. Romulus Ledbetter is a Julliard dropout, a brilliant pianist who has been derailed by clinical paranoia and now lives in a cave in New York City's Inwood Park, at the very northern tip of Manhattan Island. At times he can cope quite well, but when he's upset, the seraphs in his head take over, and he is likely to begin angry rants about Cornelius Gould Stuyvesant, the evil genius bent on world domination whose headquarters is the Chrysler Building, whence he sends out his evil Y-Rays. So when Rom finds a dead body near his cave entrance in the dead of winter, realizes that the dead man is the lover of his friend, Matthew, and that there has been foul play, he has trouble convincing the police of . . . well, of anything. So he sets off on his own investigation, using as cover his former identity as a musical prodigy.

There are some rather too convenient plot points in the novel, such as Rom's musical brilliance that opens doors for him and the fact that Rom's daughter happens to be a police officer, which provides a "benefit of the doubt" element for him that most cave-dwelling paranoid bums would not experience. These gave the book a slightly off-kilter element for me. I could, in fact, easily imagine this book as a graphic novel. However, that reservation aside, I really did enjoy reading The Cavemen's Valentine. It was original and moved right along, and the plotting was mostly fine, as well. Also, there was some very nice writing, indeed. For example, we get this description of a vase falling off a piano during a scuffle:

"The vase in front of him leapt up and dove down and hit the floor, and it was every shard for itself."

The whimsical and somehow perfectly descriptive nature of that "every shard for itself" somehow encapsulates much of what I found admirable in this novel.

The book was published in the mid-1990s, and the AIDS epidemic serves as a mostly unspoken but strong underlying current to the narrative. ( )

I read so little of this that I can't honestly rate it, but I also read lots of reviews, and enough to know it's not for me.  Much too high a yuck factor, for one.  But the bigger problem is that the voice of Romulus doesn't ring true.  I'm just not sure how well the author actually understands the different kinds of people with mental illness, or the different kinds of people who live on the street, much less the ones who are only one or the other.  That is to say, none of us need to have our prejudice that 'homeless are crazy' reinforced.  And even if he does have this Rom character down true, the story seems exploitative.  Which is a bad thing.

Won the 1995 Edgar Award for best first novel (mystery), and deserved it. It probably is the first mystery set in a cave in New York's Inwood Park.