Shadow Ticket

Literary fiction · Absurdism · Dark comedy · Noir

First published: 2025
Print length: 293 pagesPenguin Press, 2025

Description

In 1932 Milwaukee, private detective Hicks McTaggart survives by working the uneasy territory between federal agents and organized crime. A reclusive cheese magnate hires him to find his daughter, Daphne Airmont, and bring her home from Europe—a personal assignment because Hicks once helped her escape a dangerous therapist. After a bombing and pressure from the government force him out of Milwaukee, his search carries him through Belgrade and Budapest. There he crosses paths with an Interpol officer, a motorcycle courier, and an inventor whose work bends reality, while criminal factions, terrorism, bizarre machinery, and Nazism complicate every lead. The novel blends a hard-boiled pursuit with historical menace and surreal comedy, making Daphne’s disappearance one thread in a continent’s gathering disorder.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Dense · Experimental · Witty

Pace

Brisk

Tone

Absurdist · Humorous · Irreverent · Tense

Focus

Atmosphere · Mystery · Plot

Emotional intensity

3 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 5 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 4 / 5
Background knowledge: 3 / 5

Themes

Crime and punishmentObsessionPolitics and ideologyPowerTechnology and society

About Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon is an American novelist whose dense, experimental fiction turns history into a field of unstable connections. His books move across the eighteenth-century world of Mason & Dixon, wartime Europe in Gravity’s Rainbow, and the California landscapes of The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice. Across these settings, he brings scientific and historical material into contact with popular culture, absurd humor, conspiracy, and speculative invention. Pynchon often builds narratives around searches for hidden patterns: a secret postal network, an elusive figure, a mysterious device, or a case that keeps widening. Yet the pursuit of explanation rarely settles the world; it exposes institutions, technologies, and systems of power while leaving chance and paranoia uneasily entangled. His method is equally expansive and comic, shifting among voices, genres, parody, and period styles. Mason & Dixon, for example, adopts an eighteenth-century idiom while mixing documented lives with fantasy. That combination of historical reach, formal play, and antic uncertainty distinguishes his work.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Penguin Press
Language: English
ISBN: 9781594206108

Keep your books and notes in Collected for iPhone.

Apple Books is a service mark of Apple Inc. iPhone is a trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.