The Card

There are unreliable narrators, and then there's Riley, an obsessive card collector who eats meals made up of alliterative foods and insists on telling strangers that he's related to Barry Manilow. Riley's life gets turned upside down when he starts finding trading cards on the ground that seem to spell out a coded message from MI5. Riley believes the message is that he needs to save Princess Diana from some unknown threat. From that point, the story becomes almost a Hitchcockian wrong-man thriller, but funnier. Mixed in with the humor is some surprising heart, as the reader learns more about the father who walked out on Riley's family and why Riley is the way he is. Photos of the "clues" Riley finds and icons in the margins of the pages allow the reader to sort of "play along" and see the same connections he does.