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It's funny that it took me till now, almost twenty years after Lethem's debut novel, Gun, with Occasional Music was published, to get around to reading it, but looking over books I've read and books I haven't it caught my eye, and not for the first time. So I picked up a used copy on Amazon for about a buck, or a few more with postage thrown in, and shortly thereafter a padded manila envelope with a slightly beat up library copy hardcover showed up in my mailbox. Slightly beat up and covered in library plastic is perfect for this book, and my biggest issues with it is whether to put it in with the science fiction, or over with the P.I. novels. The problem is that while Jonathan Lethem crossed the streams with this noir/SF detective novel set in near future Oakland, CA, a few years past at this writing, he turned out a novel that either genre should be proud to call its own.

Product Description: While shadowing the wife of an affluent urologist, a hapless private eye falls in love with her. When the doctor turns up dead, the P.I. finds himself caught in a crossfire between the boys from the Inquisitor's Office and gangsters who operate out of the back room of the Fickle Muse.

(Source: Harcourt Brace)