OPENING LINE:

They burst into the sky, every bird in creation, angry and agitated, awakened by the same primary thought, erupting in a white feathered cloudburst, anxious and graceful, angled in ever-tightening circles toward the ground, drifting close enough to touch, and then close enought to see that it wasn’t birds — it was paper.

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Brian Remy wakes to find himself lying in a pool of his own blood, from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Frighteningly, he has no memory of the incident, and this is just the first of many memory gaps for Remy. It’s only days after September 11, and Remy is a cop who was at the site that day who gives tours of The Zero to visiting politicians and celebrities. As we lurch forward with Remy through increasingly disorienting memory lapses, we discover that he has a new job with a unnamed government agency, trying to uncover a terrorist cell. Each new lucid surfacing is like joining a movie midway through, and Remy starts to fear what he may be doing during his blacked-out gaps. Walter infuses his feverish story with equal parts black humor and paranoia, and brilliantly skewers our post 9/11 war on terror.

Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Zero