Owen Thomas
Message in a Bullet
A Raymond Mackey Mystery - Book 1
Message in a Bullet – Book 1 in the Raymond Mackey Mystery Series – brings the noir detective genre crackling to life in 21st Century Chicago.
How many bullets does it take to finally kill a lie? Raymond “Mack” Mackey,
a washed-up homicide detective ejected from the Chicago police force on
trumped-up corruption charges spends his days spinning his old homicide
cases into crime fiction potboilers, mourning the death of his wife,
coping with an inconvenient dissociative disorder, and drinking enough
bourbon to dull the pain of his freefall into the oblivion of forced retirement.
When one of Mack’s old informants goes missing and Mack’s face turns up in a
dead man’s camera, his past comes roaring painfully back to life. Now the
police want him for questioning, the Mafia want him dead and it’s increasingly
difficult to tell who, exactly, is working for whom. As a mercilessly hot
Chicago summer finally breaks and it starts raining bodies, Mack must walk
the razor’s edge between death and redemption.
This intelligent, often humorous, hard-boiled mystery will leave you
squinting for what's just beyond the page.