But did he really rescue her? Or did she rescue him? Or did it even happen? Such is the powerful, disorienting undercurrent of unexplained coincidences and unanswered questions that threatens to pull Jonathan down, down, down. But most enigmatic and shadowy of all is the suicidal young woman whom Jonathan rescues from the filthy, toxic river that cuts the city in half, and with whom he becomes unwisely involved.

There’s Jonathan’s partner, Frank, the charming ladies’ man who may-or may not-have slept with Sarah. There is Jonathan and Sarah’s ineffectual marriage therapist who likewise considers himself a charlatan. There’s the cynical and acerbic psychic, Gertrude, an aging beauty and self-confessed charlatan who professes to speak to the deceased. There’s the aging couple who have hired Jonathan to find their daughter, lost for nearly 20 years-a cold case that weighs heavily on the detective, far heavier than it should. Jonathan’s family are not the only ones up to their necks in heartbreak and confusion. And caught between them is their lonely young daughter, Jenny, who has filled the widening marital gap between her parents with a slew of imaginary friends. Sarah, his sensitive and dissatisfied wife, is an archeologist working on a controversial local dig. Paranoid and suspicious by temperament and profession, he’s lost in a city whose language he still struggles with. What is certain is that Jonathan is drowning. Even the quotations marks are missing, leaving the reader to decide whether first person narrator Jonathan is speaking or thinking to himself.

Questions lie unanswered, and truths unexpressed.

Jonathan specializes in tracking down counterfeit Gucci handbags and missing persons. Jonathan (no last name) is a former British intelligence agent (no specifics given), quiet and methodical, now running a small detective agency in a gloomy, unnamed “post-Gorbachev wasteland” somewhere in Eastern Europe. Packed with evocative, almost cinematic visual cues, The Drowned Detective is a murky, haunting tale, shrouded in the shadows of noir. Acclaimed filmmaker Neil Jordan ( The Crying Game, Interview With the Vampire, etc.) began his career as a short-story writer and novelist, and it shows.

The half drowned