Off The Shelf

Synopsis of Mr. Peanut

David Pepin has loved his wife since the moment they met, and after thirteen years of marriage he still can't imagine living without her--yet he obsessively contemplates her demise. Soon she "is "dead, and he's both deeply distraught and the prime suspect.

The officers investigating her death are intimately familiar with conjugal enigmas. Detective Ward Hastroll was happily, complacently married until his wife became inexplicably, voluntarily, and militantly bedridden. And Detective Sam Sheppard is especially sensitive to marital guilt, having decades before been convicted and then declared innocent of his wife's brutal murder.

When Pepin is linked to a hit man, 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.