Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket

It is 1932, and Hicks McTaggart, a private eye in the employ of Unamalgamated Ops and former strikebreaking thug-for-hire (a “torpedo,” in the novel’s noir patois), is “ankling his way” around Milwaukee’s Third Ward. He is keeping an eye on some suspicious types and hungrily sniffing Italian food that he can’t afford this late in the pay period, when a bomb goes off. Hicks soon gets caught up in intrigues that have him all over Milwaukee and Chicago, on a transatlantic cruise, and in Belgrade, Budapest and Fiume, the port city in Croatia.