The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey (2010)

Ninety-one-year-old Ptolemy Grey lives a memory-haunted existence in a Hoarders-ready apartment. When a beautiful teenager helps him clear out the trash, you’re primed for a May/late-December romance. But then Ptolemy takes an anti-dementia wonder drug, and, curiously, as the fog clears in his mind, Walter Mosley’s writing becomes less vivid and more repetitive. A series of bizarre plot twists — including a pot of Confederate gold and a doctor who might be Satan — cloud and blur The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey’s story line with a kind of dementia all its own. C

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