Honestly, I was looking forward to reading Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, the first work of the great man (author of Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973), now 88, for a dozen years. It was, I gathered, part espionage story, part detective fiction, featuring a lot of cheese.
It is set in Milwaukee in the early 1930s, where Prohibition is about to end, cheese fraud is rampant and a detective called Hicks McTaggart is hired to find a missing cheese heiress (here “cheez”), the daughter of the “Al Capone of cheese in exile”.
