Following Michael Kruger's The End of the Novel (George Braziller, 1992), The Man in the Tower expands and deepens Krueger's insightful and often ironic investigation of the artist in society. In beautifully crafted prose, The Man in the Tower blends two literary forms: the artist's monologue and the suspense novel. The narrator is a lonely German painter who rents an isolated tower in the South of France in order to paint the seasonal changes in nature. Plagued by exhaustive introspection and chronic artist's block, he finds comfort in translating Dante's Divine Comedy. Soon, though, an enigmatic woman interrupts his lofty reflections and entangles him in the web of a chilling murder mystery.

Where did the woman go after she disappeared in the painter's car? Did Fat Peter, the woman's 'colleague,' murder the Toulouse policeman? No one knows. Condemned by the locals as guilty by association, the painter flees to Florence in search of the woman. In the course of this Dantesque journey, he encounters motley characters - including an art-collecting sausage maker and an ex-CIA agent - that compel him to reflect on his own motivations. At once satirical and subtle, gripping and intelligent, The Man in the Tower takes readers on a turbulent journey through an interior labyrinth.