THE HAVANA ROOM by Colin Harrison

 I ordered this hardback from Amazon and received it on Mo 5/24/21 and finished on Fr 6/11/21. This author wrote 'MANHATTAN NOCTURNE' and I loved the movie. This novel was just as good and maybe I liked it even more.

An upper class lawyer living north of NYC comes home early from a business trip. His young son was having a sleepover to celebrate his eighth birthday. The man inadvertently gives one of the boys a glass of milk. The man had been eating Thai food and peanut oil was on his fingers and it got on the glass that he gave the boy. The boy had a severe allergy to peanuts and he dies. The boys father is very powerful and he destroys the man's life. 

This would have been more than enough for a novel, but the story begins again and he falls under the spell of a downtown NYC restaurant and what goes on in the secret 'Havana Room'.

Select members get to dine of a species of fish that is deadly poisonous, but provides a mind bending psychedelic experience. 

Harrison is a great writer and I'll read everything that I can find by him. 

From Google Books:

"Bill Wyeth is a real estate attorney in his late thirties who seems to have it all: a wonderful wife and son, a successful practice, and all the benefits wealth can bestow. Then, through a devastating twist of fate, he loses everything. Within weeks, he is unmoored and alone, drifting toward the city's darker corners. Wyeth is soon drawn to an old-time Manhattan steakhouse, where he becomes intrigued by the manager, Allison Sparks - sexy, complicated, and independent in all ways. Allison controls access to the restaurant's private bar, the Havana Room - and what goes on in there, he's told, is secret." "To impress Allison, Wyeth agrees to help her friend, Jay Rainey, conclude a last-minute midnight real estate transaction. But once he sees the players and the paperwork, Wyeth knows something is wrong. And before long, he's inextricably ensnared in Rainey's peculiar obsessions, which involve a Chilean businessman who feels he's been swindled, an old farmer frozen dead to a bulldozer, an outrageous black owner of a downtown hip-hop club, and a fourteen-year-old English girl. Only Rainey knows the connections between these people, which are revealed when Wyeth is finally admitted to the Havana Room where the survival of its occupants is most uncertain."