From the opening pages of The Zero - 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, lurking 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. Remy himself has a new girlfriend he doesn-t know, a son who pretends he-s dead, and an unsettling new job chasing a trail of paper scraps for a shadowy intelligence agency known as the Department of Documentation.
