Created by Thomas Pynchon
(1937-)
At least for a little while.
Wouldn’t want to anger the Pynchonistas.
Again.
To his credit, Pynchon’s not sticking with a mere sequel — he’s cooked up a completely different character and a brand new setting, although he’s still plumbing the past, and filling it to the brim with characters, sub-plots and digressions.
Last time it was the tail end of the sixties; a lazy, hazy, crazy trip into California sunshine and its murky shadows.
Suffice it to say it’s a whole different mindset vibe going on in Milwaukee in 1932. The Great Depression is dragging on, and the economy is still circling the drain, but Repeal is looming and a whole battered nation is looking forward to popping the cork. Meanwhile HICKS McTAGGART, a former strikebreaker turned private investigator with his own detective agency, Unamalgamated Ops, is working a new case.
All he has to do is bring back a wandering daughter, Daphne Airmont, heiress to a family fortune (they’re big names in Wisconsin cheese), who’s apparently wandered off. Her father has a lot of clout — he’s referred to as the “Al Capone of Cheese” — and he wants her back. He worries she’s eloped with a clarinet player in a local band.
Or has she?
She eventually pops up in Europe, with Hicks right behind her, although more by wild coincidence and cosmic WTF? than anything — it’s that kind of book. Of course, a missing heiress is the least of his problems.
“The assignment goes awry,” the New York Times says, “when he lands in Hungary alongside Nazis, Soviet spooks, British counterspies and a host of other chaos agents who are reshaping McTaggart’s mission — actually, the entire world order — in ways he never could have predicted.”
But we could. It’s Pynchon…
UNDER OATH
- “For a while, all this is perfectly enjoyable — Elmore Leonard meets Stan Lee, a kind of Technicolor noir… At some point, though, meaning that is sufficiently cryptic becomes indistinguishable from no meaning at all.”
— Kathryn Schulz (September 29, 2025, The New Yorker)
NOVELS
- Shadow Ticket (2025) | Buy this book | Buy the audio | Kindle it!
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
