MESSAGE IN A BULLET

A disgraced cop with a rare mental disorder is investigated by the police and hunted by the mob in Thomas’ first installment of a mystery series.

Raymond Mackey’s life is anything but enviable—he was forced out of the Chandler Police Department in Illinois when evidence surfaced that he was connected to Cosmo Green, an associate of José Beggamon, who was a shadowy mob boss generally known as Big Man. Now Mack works as a part-time security guard at a local mall while writing detective thrillers at home. He also suffers from a rare disorder—depersonalization-derealization disorder, or what he calls “Triple-D.” This affliction, which is intelligently described by Thomas, compels Mack to see himself in the third person, as if he’s a character in a movie. Although he’s been off the force for more than four years, Mack finds himself yet again at the center of an investigation: The police are eager to find Suri, his old informant, who may have mob ties. When Mack conducts his own investigation, he realizes Suri’s life is in terrible danger—the result of a murky past that was neither clarified nor resolved in any satisfying way. This is a quirky and refreshingly thoughtful detective story that astutely highlights the common ground shared by investigative work and the labor of writing fiction: “Crime fighters have an instinct for bullshit. Crime writers do too. They know when they’ve written a character off the edge of the cliff of plausibility, so that he just kind of hangs there, Wily-E-Coyote [sic] style, grabbing at thin air as the reader rolls their eyes.” Although the plot can become a dense jumble of entangled subplots—there are simply too many side angles and too many literary feints—this is still a captivating tale, grippingly peculiar and dramatically immersive.

A delightfully eccentric detective story despite occasional structural distractions.