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It is 1978 and Dawit, a young, handsome but down-at-heel Ethiopian refugee, is sitting in a Paris cafe. He spots M., an award-winning French author whose books had captivated him in his childhood. Now it is M. who is captivated, but by Dawit's beauty. It isn't long before she is inviting him to stay in her sumptuous apartment near the Luxembourg Gardens, kitting him out in designer clothes and showing off her "brown diamond" to the haut monde.

However, trouble stirs when the aging, infatuated M. realizes that despite her largesse, her youthful protege's gratitude extends only so far. When she invites him to her Sardinian villa on Cala di Volpe — the Bay of Foxes — Dawit incurs her wrath by experiencing desire of a different kind, and he finds he must enact a dangerous game of deceit to stay afloat.

The Bay of Foxes, Sheila Kohler's 12th work of fiction, returns to previous themes of alienation and identity, but this time around there is also a neat exploration of the perils of both fame and unchecked passion. M. is a wonderful creation — bitter, boozy and besotted, but also blind to the fact that her elegance and artistic prowess are on the wane. She takes Dawit under her wing without realizing that both of them are damaged birds.

Dawit, for all his supposed beauty, begins as a faceless nonentity, but Kohler employs two techniques to render him interesting: First, she intercuts his present with flashbacks to his privileged past among the aristocrats of the Ethiopian emperor's court, followed by the brutality of his incarceration after the military coup; and second, she has him wake up to the true nature of M.'s altruism. Our bland cipher turns into "her chattel, her slave," and how he extricates himself from her clasp makes for compulsive reading.

Kohler charts Dawit's newfound fortune — his transportation "from hell into paradise" — but truly excels when reversing it and allowing hell to invade that paradise. Halfway through the novel Kohler cranks up the psychological tension, and as shadows descend on the sun-drenched idyll, we find ourselves in some kind of homage to Patricia Highsmith's Ripley adventures.

If only the first half of the novel were so sound — or rather so convincing. Kohler's framework is simply too wobbly, her structural buildup comprising one too-convenient conceit piled on top of another. The very premise — wealthy, successful writer adopts immigrant waif off the street — is fanciful, and Dawit's elevation to a private secretary who not only edits but also completes her novels is ludicrous to the extreme.

Some of the dialogue jars, particularly those passionate appeals: "You are so beautiful, I would like to kill you. I will give you money, if you will make love to me." Granted, M. utters this "extravagantly," but still it is hard to understand why Dawit might be enticed by such a double-edged offer.

Also, his flight from Ethiopia to Europe fails to ring true (in prison he finds a "sharp file" in his bread to free his shackles), which mars his otherwise richly exotic backstory.

Ultimately, though, the last half of the novel is so engrossing that we forget these infelicities. There is familiar ground — the Italian Riviera has featured before in stories such as "Miracles in America," as have moneyed Europeans with servants and grand houses — but we are a million miles away from Kohler's Brontë history Becoming Jane Eyre, and the emotions here are headier and more complex.

The Bay of Foxes might not be Kohler's crowning achievement, but it does prove that she is one of the most versatile storytellers working today.