âA mischievously funny, keenly incisive, and mind-bending outlaw taleâ (Booklist, starred review) about love and obsession, loyalty and betrayal, race and identity, and compulsion and free will.
Writer Sandy Mulligan is in trouble. To escape his turbulent private life and the scandal thatâs maimed his public reputation, heâs retreated from Brooklyn to a quiet Michigan town to finish his long-overdue novel. There, he becomes fascinated by John Salteau, a native Ojibway storyteller who regularly appears at the local library.
But Salteau is not what he appears to beâa fact suspected by Kat Danhoff, an ambitious Chicago reporter who arrives to investigate a theft from a local Indian-run casino. Salteauâs possible role in the crime could be the key to the biggest story of her stalled career. Bored, emotionally careless, and sexually reckless, Katâs sudden appearance in town immediately attracts a restive Sandy. All three are fugitives of one kind or another. And in their growing involvement, each becomes a pawn in the othersâ gamesâall of them just one mistake from losing everything.
Moving, funny, tense, and mysterious, The Fugitives is at once a love story, a ghost story, and a crime thriller. It is also a cautionary tale of twenty-first century American lifeâa meditation on the meaning of identity, on the role storytelling plays in our understanding of ourselves and each other, and on the difficulty of making genuine connections in a world thatâs connected in almost every way. Exuberantly satirical, darkly enigmatic, and completely unforgettable, The Fugitives is âan entirely new kind of novel with exceptional interior monologues animated by deception, double-dealing, and a doomed affair that lends an air of existential dread to the storyâ (Los Angeles Times).