After a strange phone call in the middle of the night, Quinn, an author of detective stories, becomes enmeshed in a case more puzzling than any he might have written. Composed with hallucinatory clarity, combines dark humor with Hitchcock-like suspense. inaugurates the intriguing of novels that has classified as “post-existential private eye. . . . It’s as if Kafka has gotten hooked on the gumshoe game and penned his own ever-spiraling version.”