About Face

Evoking such classics as Elmer Gantry and The Day of the Locust, William Giraldi's About Face transfers the perennial literary themes of fame, ambition, and obsession to twenty-first-century Boston. Val Face, a guru self-styled on the author of The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran, mesmerizes millions with his sovereign ability to heal besotted adherents with the charismatic power of his words, the touch of his hands, and the transcendent beauty of his face. Assigned to write a profile of Val Face, impoverished thirty-year-old Seger Jovi pens a hatchet job, but then gets sucked into the mystic's maelstrom, becoming a devotee himself as he contends with Val Face's retinue of bodybuilding bodyguards and overzealous handlers. With an unforgettable array of characters, including a shrewd Boston detective and a mysterious stalker who wants Val Face dead, and with hypnotic pacing and a shocking conclusion, About Face is a novel in the grand tradition that dances along the tenuous line between the sacred and the profane.