A Victorianesque tale of Los Angeles's elite and waifish children await in Bruce Wagner's third novel, I'll Let You Go. A forlorn 12-year-old, "Tull" Trotter, distanced from his artist mother due to her drug addiction, is left to his own devices--along with his two privileged cousins, one of whom is grotesquely deformed, wearing hoods of his own design. Mainly set on the sprawling estate of Tull's grandfather (the 18th richest person in America), the children befriend an inner-city orphan (who is protected by a sharp but mentally disturbed homeless man) and embark on solving a mystery that ties these two disparate worlds together.

Ambitious in its design, Wagner's novel adeptly catalogs contemporary America's materialistic preoccupations and its pop culture, sometimes allowing litanies of prescription drugs or opulent goods to impart meaning. Wagner's prose can be moving or exacting ("One side of the newfound grandfather's face sank down a bit as if today it had decided to sleep in"), but too often alliteration almost inexcusably appears: "Twitching in troubled sleep, Pullman's was the only familiar face, but even the Dane was creepily confabulated, a dogpatch of ill-fitting body parts amid Tull's tule fog REM." If you are in the mood for a Dickensian cast of characters and L.A.'s two-dimensional gloss on the world, then I'll Let You Go is for you. --Michael Ferch