Promoted to homicide after surviving a push from a sixth-floor hotel room, Robbie Brownlaw, the youngest detective in the department, uses his new talent for synesthesia--seeing colorful shapes tied to emotions when someone speaks--to investigate the death of Garrett Asplundh, a fellow San Diego cop charged with monitoring the integrity of city officials. Simultaneous. My life was ordinary until three years ago when I was thrown out of a downtown hotel window. My name is Robbie Brownlaw, and I am a homicide detective for the city of San Diego. I am twenty-nine years old.I now have synesthesia, a neurological condition where your senses get mixed up. Sometimes when people talk to me, I see their voices as colored shapes provoked by the emotions of the speakers, not by the words themselves. I have what amounts to a primitive lie detector. After three years, I dont pay a whole lot of attention to the colors and shapes of other peoples feelings, unless they dont match up with their words.When Garrett Asplundhs body is found under a San Diego bridge, Robbie Brownlaw and his partner, McKenzie Cortez, are called on to the case. After the tragic death of his child and the dissolution of his marriage, Garrettregarded as an honest, straight-arrow officerleft the SDPD to become an ethics investigator, looking into the activities of his former colleagues. At first his death, which takes place on the eve of a reconciliation with his ex, looks like suicide, but the clues Brownlaw and Cortez find just dont add up. With pressure mounting from the police and the citys politicians, Brownlaw fights to find the truth, all the while trying to hold on to his own crumbling marriage. Was Garretts death an execution or a crime of passion, a personal vendetta or the final step in an elaborate cover-up?
