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And doesn't even know what he supposedly knows that merits a new name, a new identity, a new life?
Jay Johnson is an Average Joe, a thirty-something guy with a job in telephone sales, a regular pick-up basketball game, and a devoted girlfriend he seems ready to marry. But one weekday afternoon, he's abducted on a Los Angeles Metro train, tranquilized, interrogated, and his paper trail obliterated. What did he see, what terrible crime—or criminal—is he keeping secret? It must be something awfully big. The trouble is, Jay has no clue.
Furious and helpless, and convinced that the government has made a colossal mistake, Jay is involuntarily relocated to a community on Catalina Island—which turns out to be inhabited mainly by other protected witnesses. Isolated in a world of strangers, Jay begins to realize that only way out is through the twisted maze of lies and unreliable memories swirling through his own mind. If he can locate—or invent—a repressed memory that might satisfy the Feds, maybe he can make it back to the mainland and his wonderful, even if monotonous, life.
Set in a noir contemporary L.A. and environs, Fifty Mice is a Hitchcockian thriller as surreal and mysterious as a Kafka nightmare. Chilling, paranoiac, and thoroughly original, it will have readers grasping to distinguish what is real and what only seems that way.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
December 30, 2014 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780553552126
- File size: 253803 KB
- Duration: 08:48:45
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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November 10, 2014
At the start of this wonderfully paranoid jaunt through competing realities from Pyne (Twentynine Palms), Jay Johnson, an ordinary guy, is abducted at a Los Angeles subway station. A deputy U.S. marshal known as Public later informs him that he’s in the Federal Witness Protection Program because of a murder investigation. While Jay claims ignorance, it becomes apparent that his memories are easily forgotten, manipulated, or invented. He’s given a fake family as cover, and, as his life begins to resemble a performance art piece, layers of artificially reconstructed events begin to reveal their true nature. Even Santa Catalina Island, where Jay winds up, is like a film set, a Potemkin village populated by federal agents and witness protection program inductees. As Jay struggles to discover the truth, Pyne’s confident hand guides readers to a surprising, popcorn-dropping final twist. Agent: Victoria Sanders: Victoria Sanders & Associates. -
This highly visual psychological thriller about murder, memory, and the meaning of life is set largely on Southern California's Catalina Island in the off-season. Narrator D.W. Moffett provides a clear, slightly sibilant, well-paced delivery. He does a solid job with the sometimes uninspired dialogue between mysterious federal agents, island characters, and the book's core of protagonists who have been cast adrift. As the story ascends to its surprising climax, Moffett's quiet, authoritative voice makes the abductions, escapes, pursuits, and gunplay more believable. Listeners will never think about Catalina the same way again. F.C. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
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