From its opening pages--when hero cop Brian Remy wakes up to find he's shot himself in the head--novelist Jess Walter takes us on a harrowing tour of a city and a country shuddering through the aftershocks of a devastating terrorist attack. As the smoke slowly clears, Remy finds that his memory is skipping, lurching between moments of lucidity and days when he doesn't seem to be living his own life at all. The landscape around him is at once fractured and oddly familiar: a world dominated by a Machiavellian mayor known as "The Boss, " and peopled by anguished policemen, gawking celebrities, and pink real estate divas inventing new uses for tragedy.