The manual of detection (original 2009; edition 2009)

Armed with only an umbrella and a curious handbook, an unlikely detective must untangle a string of crimes committed in and through people's dreams

In an unnamed city always slick with rain, Charles Unwin toils as a clerk at a huge, imperious detective agency. But when the illustrious detective Travis Sivart turns up murdered, Unwin is suddenly promoted to detective and must solve the mystery himself, aided only by the Manual of Detective. Sivart's greatest cases—including The Three Deaths of Colonel Baker and The Man Who Stole November Twelfth—it turns out, were solved incorrectly, and Unwin must enter the dreams of a murdered man and face a criminal mastermind bent on total control of a slumbering city.

Set in an engrossing dreamworld, The Manual of Detection draws comparisons to every work of imaginative fiction that ever blew a reader's mind—from Jorge Luis Borges to The Yiddish Policemen's Union. But ultimately it defies comparison; it is a brilliantly conceived, meticulously realized novel that will change what you think about how you think.