In Siege of Comedians, Susan Daitch’s fifth novel, a trio of unlikely sleuths slips down a series of dark chutes through time and space in search of vanished others. Wildly sensitive to the detritus of human existence, they all land in the same subterranean warren of evidence, sniffing out connections that they traced by means of a weird forensics.

Iridia, the first of Daitch’s sleuths, is a sculptor who works for a crime laboratory specializing in the reconstruction of faces. There is an explosion, and three people — Daitch is fond of threes — are blown to unidentifiable bits. Iridia’s task is to reconstruct their faces from what’s left behind. She is thwarted in this task by a man who takes over her workspace and forces her to replace her reconstructions with three anonymous others. A violent aesthete who plays classical music while she works, the intruder likens the erasure of each face to the extinction of a language — a whole culture goes with it. He asks Iridia, “What do faces tell you? What is the language of the face? For these three, that language must become obsolete.”

Daitch’s second sleuth, Martin Shusterman, is an accent coach. Although, like Iridia, he specializes in the particular and the individual, his expertise is not faces but voiceprints, which he approaches by combining linguistics and physics, geology and history. He

analyz[es] patterns of sound waves, resonance and anti-resonance characteristics, plosive spikes, and slopes, phonemes. Atoms of speech flooded the screen, waiting to be interpreted. Looking at the topology of a voiceprint was like looking at a cross section of the Earth’s crust […] Here’s the Jurassic layer, the Mississippian layer, but these outcroppings, what you see, that’s the most recent, so that’s what the eye or ear registers first, but there’s a lot of history underneath.

Shusterman’s particular specialty is listening for clues of personal history that the speaker might want to hide. “That hidden piece that the suspect didn’t want known, that trace of years spent in Shaker Heights or East Los Angeles, but not too far east, or Jersey City, despite the suspect’s attempt to portray herself as someone else.” He hears other lies, too:

He was like a seismograph, registering that vocal tremor or slight change in pitch that indicated anxiety and perhaps the airing of a stretched truth. You just never knew what he would find. Shusterman became known for hearing things you never thought possible.

After Shusterman’s girlfriend, Abril, is disappared in Buenos Aires, Shusterman learns that a number of Nazi war criminals went underground there. One them holds the key to Abril’s murder. Using his special talent with voiceprints, Shusterman turns up a historical connection that sends the novel back to Europe during and just after the Second World War. After a detour through the film industry, Shusterman uncovers yet another layer of history — literal strata, wide and deep, of unpunished war crimes in Vienna. “There is enough evidence of the country’s crimes and complicities extant, still to be found if you travel highways and byways,” says one of his informants. “No secrets. Everybody knows. Why preserve more, you know?” Except that bodies keep turning up, especially in postwar projects to rebuild bombed-out cities. “Some of them dated from the 1940s and showed signs of torture. Some skulls had simply taken a bullet. Then,” the informant reveals, “there was another layer of bodies, but truly very old.” Real estate development gives way to archaeology, as Shusterman’s investigation unearths a brothel that was operations “during the siege of the city by the Turks in the late 1600s.”

This precipitous shift brings the novel into its third and final part, focused on women forced into prostitution in seventeenth-century occupied Vienna. Nothing so far has prepared the reader for this development, but that’s exactly how history works, sometimes. (No one expects a global pandemic, either.) As the novel’s third act unfolds, Daitch expertly reels in her catch. Events begin to resonate with characters, themes, and situations that have come before, prompting a fresh set of recognitions, atonements and partial restitutions that give rise, in turn, to new conflicts.

Daitch is interested in the processes that turn people — individuals with their own histories, interests, and attachments — into nonspecific, context-less bodies. This kind of violence aims to obliterate what’s special, idiosyncratic, unique — a name, a face, a way of speaking. What is so disquieting about Siege of Comedians is that although the book opens with Iridia trying to reconstruct the faces of a murdered trio, we soon lose sight of this initial group. The mystery of their identities is never fully resolved. This apparent loose end must be taken seriously as a choice. What Daitch delivers with this challenging novel is an intimation of the particular grief that attends a sudden and violent loss, the sort of loss that sticks around as a haunting.

Fans of Daitch’s previous work will enjoy her glittering reprisals of familiar themes — film, history, identity, concealment — in Siege of Comedians. But the fireworks, while spectacular, also make a point. The novel’s closing scenes include the following mise-en-abyme: Iridia visits a life-sized exhibit of the intertwined histories we’ve just read and is tempted to take a step beyond investigation and actually join the scene. “In the last few feet of the diorama, I could step in, like those golden statues that are really an actual person covered in metal paint who don’t move until someone puts a coin in their hat.” Sensing that her role would be limited, that hers would only be a walk-on part with too much determined in advance, she refuses — but lightly, in a way that evokes a different and perhaps more open future: “I don’t think so, not today, not anytime soon.”

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