Gun, with Occasional Music [Paperback]

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.
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 the author of Motherless Brooklyn is a wry, funny, and satiric look at all that the future may hold.
 

PRAISE FOR GUN, WITH OCCASIONAL MUSIC
Marries Chandler's style and Philip K. Dick's vision . . . An audaciously assured first novel. -Newsweek

Marvelous . . . Stylish, intelligent, darkly humorous and highly readable entertainment. -San Francisco Examiner

PRAISE FOR MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN
The best novel of the year . . . Utterly original and deeply moving. -Esquire

Philip Marlowe would blush. And tip his fedora. -Newsweek

chapter 1

IT WAS THERE WHEN I WOKE UP, I SWEAR. THE FEELING.

It was two weeks after I'd quit my last case, working for Maynard Stanhunt. The feeling was there before I tuned in the musical interpretation of the news on my bedside radio, but it was the musical news that confirmed it: I was about to work again. I would get a case. Violins were stabbing their way through the choral arrangements in a series of ascending runs that never resolved, never peaked, just faded away and were replaced by more of the same. It was the sound of trouble, something private and tragic; suicide, or murder, rather l“ä