David Pepin has loved his wife since the moment they met, and after thirteen years of marriage he still can't imagine living without her — yet he obsessively contemplates her demise. Soon she is dead, and he's both deeply distraught and the prime suspect in her possible murder.

The officers investigating her death are intimately familiar with conjugal enigmas. Detective Ward Hastroll was happily married until his wife became inexplicably and militantly bedridden. And Detective Sam Sheppard is especially sensitive to marital guilt, having decades before been convicted and then declared innocent of his wife's brutal murder.

When Pepin is linked to a hit man, the ambiguity enfolding this case begins to resemble the Escher drawings that inspire the computer games Pepin designs for a living. These complex, interlocking dramas of murder and marriage brilliantly explore the twinned impulses of love and hate, each endlessly cycling into the other.

Surprising, emotionally intense, and astonishing in its reach, Mr. Peanut is a first novel of the highest order.