Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem

Gun, With Occasional Music

A Novel

Jonathan Lethem

HarperCollins · Print & ebook · September 1, 2003

A hard-boiled detective tale full of talking animals and murder, from the award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Arrest Gumshoe Conrad Metcalf has problems—there's a rabbit in his waiting room and a trigger-happy kangaroo on his tail.

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Who it’s for
A genre-bent noir with enough literary bite to keep the grin slightly uneasy.
Genres
Sci-Fi Crime, Private Eye Fiction, Hard-Boiled Mystery
Published
HarperCollins, September 1, 2003

About this book

A hard-boiled detective tale full of talking animals and murder, from the award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Arrest Gumshoe Conrad Metcalf has problems—there's a rabbit in his waiting room and a trigger-happy kangaroo on his tail. Near-future Oakland is a brave new world where evolved animals are members of society, the police monitor citizens by their karma levels, and mind-numbing drugs such as Forgettol and Acceptol are all the rage.

Continue reading

Metcalf has been shadowing Celeste, the wife of an affluent doctor. Perhaps he's falling a little in love with her at the same time. When the doctor turns up dead, our amiable investigator finds himself caught in a crossfire between the boys from the Inquisitor's Office and gangsters who operate out of the back room of a bar called the Fickle Muse. Mixing elements of sci-fi, noir, and mystery, this clever first novel from a beloved author is a wry, funny, and satiric look at all that the future may hold.

Noir, Twisted

A genre-bent noir with enough literary bite to keep the grin slightly uneasy.

Come here for

  • hard-boiled snap with sci-fi static
  • prestige crime-noir sheen

Expect

  • crime and suspense
  • sustained immersion

Where it sits

Sci-Fi Crime43%
Hard-Boiled Mystery32%
Private Eye Fiction32%

Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.

Publisher categories

  • Fantasy
  • Contemporary Fantasy
  • Literary Fiction
  • Mystery
Show all 8 publisher categories
  • Hard-Boiled Mystery
  • Police Procedurals
  • Women Detectives
  • Sci-Fi
Authors
Jonathan Lethem
Publisher
HarperCollins
Published
September 1, 2003
Format
Print & ebook
Reading lane
Fantasy