"What if a man is placed in the Federal Witness Protection Program against his will? And doesn't even know what he supposedly knows that merits a new name, a new identity, a new life? Jay Johnson is an Average Joe, a thirty-something guy with a job in telephone sales, a regular pick-up basketball game, and a devoted girlfriend he seems ready to marry. But one weekday afternoon, he's abducted on a Los Angeles Metro train, tranquilized, interrogated, and his paper trail obliterated. What did he see, what terrible crime-or criminal-is he keeping secret? It must be something awfully big. The trouble is, Jay has no clue. Furious and helpless, and convinced that the government has made a colossal mistake, Jay is involuntarily relocated to a community on Catalina Island-which turns out to be inhabited mainly by other protected witnesses. Isolated in a world of strangers, Jay begins to realize that only way out is through the twisted maze of lies and unreliable memories swirling through his own mind. If he can locate-or invent-a repressed memory that might satisfy the Feds, maybe he can make it back to the mainland and his wonderful, even if monotonous, life. Set in a noir contemporary L.A. and environs, Fifty Mice is a Hitchcockian thriller as surreal and mysterious as a Kafka nightmare. Chilling, paranoiac, and thoroughly original, it will have readers grasping to distinguish what is real and what only seems that way"--
"A suspenseful, paranoiac tale about an innocent citizen whisked into the witness protection program because he knows something that he doesn't know he knows"--
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I received this book for free from Penguin's First to Read program. The plot sounded interesting and the book was pretty good for the first few chapters but then slowed to a snail's pace. I wanted to put it down then but kept going. I got through a little over half then gave up. It was just too slow and boring.
