HEAD CASE

Despite the bullet wound that got him bounced from the Chicago PD because his head was so messed up, private eye Sam Kelson keeps getting cases nearly as off-kilter as he is.

Taken to Clement Memorial Hospital after getting shot once again, this time by a car thief, Kelson logs just enough hours in the intensive care unit to befriend Jose Feliciano, an improbably named nurse who suspects foul play in the deaths of Patricia Ruddig, Josh Templeton, and Daryl Vaughn, who entered the unit at different times and circumstances but all left in dubious ways. Is Kelson willing to take a retainer from Jose, who’s urged on by his fiancee, Haitian nurse Wendy Thomas, to ask some awkward questions? Kelson, whose neurological disinhibition makes it ridiculously easy for him to ask awkward questions but impossible for him to lie when he’s asked questions himself, agrees to poke around, and in no time at all, his conversations with Clement orderly Caroline Difley and head custodian Aleksandar Kovacic get them both fired when someone rats them out to hospital security head Richard Jacobson, whose father, Dr. Jeremy Jacobson, just happens to be chief of that troubled ICU. It’s pretty obvious where this is going, but Wiley still has several tricks up his sleeve involving the spectacularly dysfunctional Jacobson family, an unlikely romance for Kelson, and a pile of corpses that mounts so high the ICU can’t contain them.

Through it all, Wiley’s loopy detective continues to be the most interesting feature of his adventures.