There Is an Order to Things

I’ve been working on a novel for a while now, and I’ve reached the point where I need to start telling people it exists.

It’s called An Order to Things. It’s set in New York. At its surface it’s about a detective named Bishop — the city’s best, by any measure — who works a murder case that becomes the instrument of his destruction. The machinery behind that destruction involves old money, institutional power, a real estate empire built offshore, and people who have learned to make order look like righteousness.

But the novel underneath that novel is about something older and less procedural.

There’s a distinction I kept returning to while building this book. The difference between worth that has to be continuously earned — proven, defended, confirmed by the world’s verdict — and worth that simply is. Settled before the work begins. Not contingent on the outcome. I wanted to know what those two things look like in behavior. Under pressure. When the world stops confirming what a person built their life on.

Bishop is one answer. Andi — the woman he loves, an attorney doing estate work that turns out to be something else entirely — is the other. They’re both good people. They both do the right things. What they don’t share is what happens inside when the ground shifts.

There’s a sentence that appears three times in the novel. At the beginning it sounds like wisdom. At the end it sounds different. That’s the whole architecture, really — the same sentence, the same words, a reader who has become someone different in between.

I’m writing here because this book is going to find its readers before it’s finished or afterward — but either way I think it finds people who already know something about the question it’s asking.

— Penn