Following up the best-seller Hairstyles of the Damned (more than 70,000 copies sold) with a spectacular coming-of-age-30 tale, Joe Meno proves once again why he's the hottest indie author in America. Also check out How the Hula Girl Sings and Tender as Hellfire.

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"The Boy Detective Fails will break your heart, and then pick up the pieces and put you back together again."
--T Cooper, author of Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes

In the twilight of a mysterious childhood full of wonder, Billy Argo, boy detective, is brokenhearted to find that his younger sister and crime-solving partner, Caroline, has committed suicide. Ten years later, Billy, age thirty, returns from an extended stay at St. Vitus' Hospital for the Mentally Ill to discover the world full of unimaginable strangeness: office buildings vanish without reason, small animals turn up without their heads, and cruel villains ride city buses to complete their evil schemes.

Lost within this unwelcoming place, Billy finds the companionship of two lonely, extraordinary children, Effie and Gus Mumford -- one a science fair genius, the other a charming, silent bully. With a nearly forgotten bravery, Billy treads from the unendurable boredom of a telemarketing job, stumbles into the awkward beauty of a desperate pickpocket named Penny Maple, and confronts the nearly impossible solution to the mystery of his sister's death. Along a path laden with hidden clues and codes that dare the reader to help Billy decipher the mysteries he encounters, the boy detective may learn the greatest secret of all: the necessity of the unknown.

JOE MENO is the author of the books Hairstyles of the Damned, Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir, How the Hula Girl Sings, and Tender As Hellfire. He was the winner of the 2003 Nelson Algren Award for short fiction and is a professor of creative writing at Columbia College Chicago.