THE BIG DREAM

A career’s worth of contradictions come home to roost for Thomas’ neurotic detective in this novel, the final volume of a crime trilogy.

Raymond Mackey, a wrongfully disgraced Chicago cop turned investigator for Internal Affairs, is having a rough time. His side hustle as an aspiring crime novelist isn’t going well. He’s concerned his drinking has become a problem. He can’t quit his pack-a-day smoking habit, even after his doctors discover a shadow on his lung. His depersonalization-derealization disorder—a dissociative condition that causes him to view himself from above his own body and critique his every behavior—has gotten worse. (He calls it his “triple D.”) He suspects he’s being followed by somebody, but he isn’t sure who; Mack is a man with many enemies, including judges, reporters, his former partners on the force, and a pseudonymous Chicago crime boss known only as Big Man. Worst of all is the discovery that Mack’s dead wife, Marlo Kline, the woman he loved more than anything and whose death he has never gotten over, may not have been faithful to him. At least, that’s what’s implied by an old photograph supplied to Mack by the mysterious Frenchie Marie, an unassuming woman whose motivations Mack cannot discern. Frenchie wants Mack to investigate his own lieutenant at Internal Affairs to uncover the man’s connection to a recent double homicide—indeed, to become the very sort of informant Mack has always denied being. In exchange, Frenchie will help him figure out the meaning of the old photograph that shows Marlo hand in hand with one of the city’s greatest crooks, seated at the same table as mob fixers and a future mayor of Chicago. There’s a conspiracy afoot in the Windy City, the biggest Mack has ever encountered, but it’s unclear whether he’s meant to unravel it or if he himself is at its center. As Mack quips, “I’m realizing that paranoia means never making a final decision about these kinds of things.”

Thanks to Mack’s “triple D,” his narration is occasionally interrupted at critical moments by the intrusions of his disembodied psyche. “He wants me to tell him what I see,” the psyche says of Mack after a man leaps out of his closet, knocks him to the ground, and sticks a bag over his head. “He wants to know who’s in the room with him. Wish I could help. Triple D doesn’t work that way. I show him what it looks like to be him.” For all the postmodern flourishes, Thomas excels at delivering insightful, almost epigrammatic observations, like this one from Mack about how tensions arise at Internal Affairs: “That’s the problem with the modern workplace. Trying not to stand too close to one guy means standing too close to someone else. A planet this populated makes watching your own back almost impossible.” Some readers may balk at the nearly 650-page length, but Thomas keeps the narrative compelling as Mack races doggedly toward his hardboiled destiny.

An immersive mystery caper with a memorably disturbed protagonist at its center.