Timothy Hallinan's private eye Simeon Grist has gone out of print and he's pissed about it.

Simeon thought he was living a good life—solving mysteries, falling in and out of love, risking life and limb to do the right thing. Then the last Simeon Grist mystery was pulped to make newsprint, and he woke up in a room where nothing ever changed except his sense of who he was: his entire existence was a work of fiction that the real world was in the process of forgetting. And when one of his few remaining readers is murdered, Simeon discovers that he can—at great risk—step out of the pages of his books and into the world of the living. The only problem: even if he succeeds in solving the murder, winning the love of a real-life woman, and finding the man who wrote him, he could still die trying.