Motherless Brooklyn

Motherless Brooklyn is narrated by Lionel Essrog, one of four orphans raised at St. Vincent's Home for Boys and taken under the wing of small-time operator Frank Minna, who employs them at his car service and detective agency in Brooklyn. Lionel has Tourette's syndrome, and his verbal tics, compulsions, and hyperattentiveness to language and pattern shape both his voice and his method of thinking.

When Minna is murdered outside a Zen center in Manhattan, Lionel takes it on himself to find out who killed the only father figure he ever had, even as the rest of Minna's crew wants the case dropped. His investigation pulls him into the world of Minna's associates, a mysterious real estate operation, and secrets Minna kept from all of them.

Jonathan Lethem's novel is as much a study of Lionel's singular, tic-driven consciousness as it is a hardboiled detective story, using the conventions of noir to explore obsession, loyalty, and language itself.