June 1, 2021
A brain-damaged professor of Russian literature inserts himself into the search for Chicago's Magnificent Mile Strangler, with surpassingly weird results. Calvert Greene thinks he's dead because the car crash that killed his wife, Meredith, and nearly killed him a year ago left him with Cotard's syndrome, a malady that makes him feel as if he's living in a post-mortem haze while his vital functions slowly ebb. Desperate to learn the truth about the accident before his mind shuts down for good, he signs himself out of the New Horizons facility just as rookie detective Whistler Diaz is assigned the case of Anna Beth Harpole, a San Francisco travel consultant in town for a convention whose early morning jog was ended by someone who choked her to death. Working with, and sometimes against, Text Block feature reporter Monica, who calls herself Moe, Whistler, who fancies himself another Frank Serpico, links the visitor's untimely death to the murders of Precious Sharpe, Maria Reyes, and Virginia Flores. Meanwhile, Calvert, clearly unable to return to his teaching post at the University of Chicago, takes a job at the other end of the social scale as a trainee with Bug Off, an operation dedicated to controlling the bedbug population at the city's luxury hotels. Graham weaves a web that will remind fans of the playfully inventive graphic novels he's made a specialty: a foursquare serial-killer plot peopled with head cases, some benign, some not so much. Readers will never look at life after death, or whatever it is, the same way.
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