Mr. Peanut

David Pepin has loved his wife since the moment they met, and after thirteen years he still can't imagine living without her - yet he obsessively contemplates her demise. Soon she's dead, and he's both deeply distraught and the prime suspect. The detectives investigating her death have, as it happens, considerable experience with conjugal enigmas. Ward Hastroll was happily, complacently married - until his wife became inexplicably, voluntarily, and militantly bedridden. And Sam Sheppard has for decades been especially sensitive to the intricacies of marital guilt, for the most personal of reasons...When Pepin is linked to a hitman, the ambiguity enfolding this case begins to resemble the Escher drawings that inspire the computer games he designs for a living. These complex, interlocking dramas brilliantly explore the twinned impulses of love and hate, murder and marriage, each endlessly recycling into the other. Mesmerizing, hugely poignant, astonishing in its reach, Mr. Peanut is a police procedural of the soul and a first novel of the highest order.