David Pepin has loved his wife since the moment they met, and after thirteenyears he still can't imagine living without her-yet he obsessivelycontemplates her demise. Soon she's dead, and he's both deeply distraughtand the prime suspect.

The detectives investigating her death have, as it happens, considerableexperience with conjugal enigmas. Ward Hastroll was happily, complacentlymarried -- until his wife became inexplicably, voluntarily, and militantlybedridden. And Sam Sheppard has for decades been especially sensitive to theintricacies of marital guilt, for the most personal of reasons..

When Pepin is linked to a hitman, the ambiguity enfolding this case beginsto resemble the Escher drawings that inspire the computer games he designsfor a living. These complex, interlocking dramas brilliantly explore thetwinned impulses of love and hate, murder and marriage, each endlesslyrecycling into the other. Mesmerizing, hugely poignant, astonishing in itsreach, Mr. Peanut is a police procedural of the soul and a first novel ofthe highest order.