The Big Dream: A Raymond Mackey Mystery (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798987167793)

From multiple award-winning, best-selling author Owen Thomas, finally, The Big Dream. Like Message in a Bullet and The Russian Doll, this ultimate book in the gripping Raymond Mackey Mystery Trilogy inches you to the edge of your seat and keeps you there until the last captivating twist in a corkscrew plot. Welcome to spiral noir.

Marlo. Still dead. But more of a mystery than ever. A stack of business cards in an old file. A surprise lover. An old photo of Marlo keeping company with the Chicago underworld. It's enough to make a hard-boiled detective wonder whether he ever really knew his wife at all. That realization alone might kill him.

Doesn't matter. Bloody, beaten and broken; outgunned and maybe even out of his mind, Mack is coming for answers.

But if the answers are out there, they won't be easy to find. Not in a city drowning in corruption. Not with so many enemies - police departments, the court system, the governor's office, the mob, even the mayor of Chicago - looking to bring him down. Not with Big Man around every rain-soaked corner, relishing the deadly game of cat and mouse over drugs, murder, sex trafficking, money laundering, government influence peddling, and, most recently, the fraudulent manipulation of international financial markets.

"I'm fine with humanity," says Mack. "It's the people I can do without."

Mack's new gig working for Internal Affairs hasn't made him any new friends. The local cops still think Mack's a mole for the mob. The Illinois Attorney General wants to lock him up for his role in the Russian Doll fiasco. Mack's boss believes he's a back-stabbing traitor after his job, even though a little surveillance shows the boss stepping out on his wife with the mistress of a dead man while the evidence that he had a hand in a double homicide is piling up with the bodies. Mack's missing informant turns up alive, but she has a formidable new friend and may be out for violent revenge. And then there's the foreign agent quietly flying under the FBI's radar, in town to take Big Man down, murder him if necessary, and she'll do anything to coerce Mack's assistance.

So Mack can only count on himself. But that's a problem too. The PTSD keeps him from sleeping and amps up the paranoia. The new spot on his lung keeps him from smoking but does nothing about the craving. The alcoholism is gaining traction. And the personality disorder is as strong as ever: he still follows himself around like a helium balloon tied to his own beltloop. Watching from above. Commenting. Reminding him that he isn't what he once was. Showing him the steepening downhill slide of his life.

"Gritty, atmospheric, and darkly witty, The Big Dream is masterful noir that explores the cost of loyalty, the weight of regret, and the lengths one man will go for answers."

Perfect for fans of Michael Connelly, Raymond Chandler, Lee Child, and Robert Galbraith.