This detective novel — presented in three distinct novellas — traces the ever-deepening involvement of the protagonist Anthony de Stasio in a series of political nightmares, from a cursed firearm in “Steyr Mannlicher” that leads him through the world of a single mother’s hardscrabble poverty; to the tormented life of a daughter imprisoned in a world her father built for her in “Photo Array”; to the workings of a mysterious postwar utopian cult that traffics street kids in an attempt to engineer a universal refusal of the vote in “The Unaffiliated.” Each novella deepens Stasio’s immersion in the charnel house of contemporary politics, and features a supporting cast of characters whose personal involvement attempts to rescue him from it.