In professional wrestling, kayfabe is the art of making something staged appear real. But what happens when the lies become deadly?Ray Mercer is fifty-six, divorced, and a former Los Angeles police officer with a damaged knee, an ageing Ford Crown Victoria, and a lifelong obsession with professional wrestling.These days, he earns a modest living finding missing pets. It's quieter than police work, considerably less dangerous, and generally involves more crawling beneath houses than confronting criminals.Then a woman named Elena Morales arrives at his door.Her twenty-two-year-old daughter, Sofia, has disappeared. The police have little to go on, and Elena is running out of people willing to listen. Ray isn't a private detective, and he certainly isn't looking for trouble. But something about her desperation makes it impossible to turn her away.What begins as a missing-person investigation slowly draws him into a world of deception, violence and dangerous people who have spent years making sure nobody asks the wrong questions.As the trail leads through the streets of Los Angeles and towards the Mexican border, Ray discovers that the difference between what people pretend to be and what they really are can be a matter of life and death.Armed with little more than twenty-seven years of police experience, an unreliable knee and a battered briefcase filled with recordings of classic wrestling matches, Ray must decide just how far he's prepared to go for a young woman he's never met.Because in wrestling, everybody knows there's a script.In the real world, nobody tells you when the performance ends.KAYFABE is a gripping, atmospheric psychological crime thriller about deception, loyalty, ageing, and the unexpected courage of an ordinary man who refuses to look away.A novel by Oliver J Gough. Read more
