Book excerpt: A mad director, off his meds, is making a movie about how he murders the producers who ruined his career. The movie is in his mind. The murders are real. Tommy Veasy, a pot-smoking homicide detective--our hero--who writes poetry to help him solve cases and ward off despair, thinks he sees a pattern in these seemingly accidental deaths. His colleagues think he's being dramatic. But the bodies keep piling up. The staff of a syndicated TV show in its tenth year, formerly an international hit but now only being aired in Montenegro and Botswana, worries about how they will maintain their Hollywood lifestyles when they become unemployable. How will the producer finance his two-hooker-a-weekend habit? How will the staff writer pay private school tuition, an underwater mortgage, tennis club dues, the housekeeper, the gardener, cable TV bills, the couples' therapist, et al.? Not a big problem: the mad director has planted a bomb in the office phone and is frantically trying to set it off. And meanwhile, a home invader keeps invading the wrong homes, to everyone's perplexity. In other words: it's just another day in paradise.