Infinite Ground by Martin MacInnes

Martin MacInnes’ aggressively postmodern detective tale takes place in an unnamed South American country, as an unnamed inspector tries to solve the case of a man named Carlos who has mysteriously disappeared. Probably.

This Saltire Society-shortlisted debut plays with the seemingly simple question of what happened to a man who got up to go to the bathroom and never came back. As the hot summer days beat down on the investigating inspector’s mind, he finds even the most solid facts of his world begin to soften and warp. He delves into microbiology to try and solve the case at a molecular level, grows suspicious of the authenticity of even the victim’s grieving mother and develops ever weirder theories as his grip on reality starts to slide. By the story’s halfway point, trying to figure out what really happened becomes like trying to determine ‘up’ while floating in outer space. 

One of the great strengths of this novel is the empirical, terse language that it is delivered in: even as things grow hazier and the inspector’s logic grows visibly less coherent, his story is told with the same scientific certainty as any Sherlock Holmes case. With Infinite Ground, MacInnes delivers a Don DeLillo/Thomas Pynchon-esque piece of anti-detective fiction with enough style of its own to not get lost in their shadow.