Kincaid: Memoir of a Rogue (Randomly Accessed)

Jim Pyra's Kincaid: Memoir of a Rogue (Randomly Accessed) earns its Booky primarily on the strength of its dialogue, which is doing serious architectural work from the first page. The banter between Elroy and Kat is the engine of the novel's first act — it's quick, naturalistic, and loaded with character information delivered so painlessly you don't notice you're being briefed. When Kat says "fuck the celery root" in response to an Escoffier lecture, you know exactly who these two people are and what they mean to each other. That's craft.

The dialogue also carries the novel's central mystery with admirable efficiency. Kat's pivot from cocktail-can casualness to rigorous internet archaeology — "EHE is some kind of heart condition. I'll spell it out" — is precisely observed and genuinely funny. Pyra trusts his characters to be smart, and that trust pays off: their conversation about past-life memory, Lamontaigne, and Wroclaw/Breslau is more engaging than most thriller exposition dumps.

On characterization, Elroy is a quietly compelling protagonist — a Grande Diplôme dropout slinging line-cook steel knives, carrying someone else's pig carcass, and sitting on a secret that's either schizophrenia or reincarnation. Kat is the rare best-friend figure who has her own interiority; her death vision backstory is sketched economically but lands. The 18th-century sequences give the novel its tonal signature: the rogue Kincaid — Irish-born, white-coated one week and red-coated the next, literally a turncoat — is a genuinely fun alter ego. The accident sequence, arriving just as the relationship dynamic peaks, is abrupt and brutal in the best way. Pyra knows how to break the rhythm.