Wallace has never written a sequel to one of his novels. Each book has a different urgent topic, a different faraway locale, and a different subject for "behind-the-scenes" information.

The Prize exemplifies a group of Wallace's novels that may be called "exotic melodramas." Others in this group include The Pigeon Project (1979), The Almighty (1982), The Seventh Secret (1986), and The Golden Room (1989).

Each exotic melodrama places a cast of globe-trotting people in a scenic locale (Zurich, Venice, Berlin, old Chicago) where all are swept up in intrigue.

The Pigeon Project recounts the EastWest battle for a scientist's discovery that lengthens the human life span to 150 years. The Almighty tells how the son of a media mogul battles to keep his father's empire. In The Seventh Secret a researcher stumbles upon evidence Hitler did not die in a Berlin bunker. The Golden Room depicts a fashionable nineteenth-century bordello stalked...