Kenneth Malone, an FBI agent with a talent for handling telepathic oddities, is expecting a break when Director Andrew J. Burris calls him in. Instead, Burris hands him a baffling assignment: a stolen red Cadillac has crossed state lines into New York, and something impossible happened when police tried to inspect it. Sergeant Jukovsky was knocked unconscious, witnesses contradicted one another, and the car later seemed to drive itself down the West Side Highway before crashing and burning at 125th Street with no driver ever found. Soon Malone is found dazed on a New York sidewalk, battered, memory-blurred, and tied to the vanished Cadillac in ways he can't yet explain. As he and the police struggle to make sense of his blackout, the case widens into a comic, suspenseful tangle of espionage, psychic intrigue, and absurdity. Malone follows leads on the mysterious "Silent Spooks," sparring with Lieutenant Lynch, while trying to keep his life from sliding entirely out of control. Between tequila, a downtown date with Dorothy, and a scramble for coveted "Hot Seat" tickets, this offbeat adventure mixes hardboiled FBI action with romance, wit, and surreal mystery. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.

À propos de l'auteur

Garrett, Randall

Randall Garrett was an American science fiction and fantasy writer whose lively imagination and sharp wit made him a distinctive voice in mid-20th-century genre fiction. Born in 1927, he came of age during a period when pulp magazines, paperback originals, and the expanding world of speculative storytelling offered fertile ground for ambitious new writers, and he quickly proved adept at moving between science fiction, mystery, and adventure. Garrett built a reputation for fast-paced, idea-driven stories that combined humor, ingenuity, and a strong sense of narrative momentum, earning a devoted readership through his magazine fiction and later his collaborations and series work. His writing often explores intelligence, problem-solving, social order, and the tension between individual freedom and institutional power, all while keeping a playful, accessible tone that makes serious questions feel entertaining rather than heavy-handed. That balance gives his work lasting relevance: readers today can still recognize in his stories the appeal of clever resistance, the absurdities of bureaucracy, and the thrill of seeing a resourceful mind outmaneuver a complicated world. Garrett’s legacy lies in helping define a form of speculative fiction that is both entertaining and intellectually nimble, and his influence endures in writers who value wit as much as world-building. Readers who enjoy classic science fiction with humor, inventive plotting, and a brisk, old-school sense of adventure are especially likely to appreciate his work.