Bruce has a problem: it's Christmas Day, and he's just woken up in a detox unit on the Bowery in New York City. He's a serious alcoholic. Now he's hit bottom and finds himself lying in a bed on a ward full of tubercular guys puking their guts out. He realizes for the millionth time that he needs to change his life and go to Alcoholics Anonymous. But he also isn't sure he can face the boring wasteland that he thinks his life will become without alcohol.

So he drags himself reluctantly through the motions of the mandatory recovery program forced upon him by the detox counselors. One fellow alcoholic catches his eye: a cynical, educated man named Godfrey who likes to call himself God for short. They compromise with Guff, a childhood nickname given to Godfrey by one of his sisters.

Apparently Guff has a trust fund, and – while single and without children – an extended family who cares about him. Of all the alcoholics on the detox unit, Guff looks the most likely to get his life together. The others seem old before their time and hovering on the brink of death. In fact, Bruce actually finds one of them dead in the laundry room.

But it comes as a horrible shock to Bruce – and a wake-up call – when Guff dies right in front of him, of an apparent seizure, on the ward few nights later. Released from detox, Bruce can't forget about Guff. The guy obviously had secrets as well as a mean streak, but he and Bruce were also on the verge of becoming friends.

Bruce describes Guff to his friends, Jimmy and Barbara. Jimmy, a former alcoholic, is a history buff and computer genius. Barbara is his girlfriend, an addictions counselor. They make an amusingly diverse New Yorker couple with his Irish-Catholic guilt and her Jewish-American talkativeness. The two of them have been anxiously watching Bruce for years, hoping for his recovery while trying to maintain detachment for their own sake (and so as not be "enablers").

Now the three of them start turning over the odd facts about Guff's death. Before you know it, they are involved in their own unofficial murder investigation, greatly helped by Jimmy's internet skills and Barbara's access as a mental health professional to confidential information at the detox center.

Death Will Get You Sober unfolds at a lively pace: it stays mostly in first-person viewpoint with Bruce, and delves into third-person occasionally to follow Barbara. As they unravel the mystery, it gives Bruce something to focus on that will keep him sober.

Like any mystery, Death Will Get You Sober has one or two flaws. First, I never really knew what, if anything, Guff's status as a Vietnam veteran brings to the story. In fact it leads to a whopper of an error. On page 77, we've got a 47 year-old Vietnam veteran, and on page 86 we've got people with their laptops in an internet coffee shop, which would put the setting at about 2004 at the earliest.

It's possible that Guff might have been an 18 year-old in Saigon just before it fell in 1975 – but only as a specialist with MACV-SOG, and not a draftee as in the story. American ground troops were all withdrawn by August 1972, and the draft itself ended in January 1973. Maybe Guff is really supposed to be fifty-seven years old. Another thing I wondered about is Bruce's ineptitude at fighting off the villain during a life-threatening confrontation near the end.

The strength of Death Will Get You Sober lies in the three characters of Bruce, Jimmy, and Barbara. Their skills complement each other well, and their dialog is funny and believable. New York City comes to life as their gritty and highly-detailed backdrop. Best of all, we get an insider look at Barbara's world, the sometimes overwhelming life of a big-city mental-health professional. This is a highly specialized profession with its own rituals and jargon and it's skillfully integrated here: plenty of detail that never drags down the pace.

With what seems like every third person in recovery these days, which of us readers wouldn't be curious about how this world operates? In Death Will Get You Sober, we get the viewpoints of both the alcoholic and the treatment professional. Death Will Get You Sober, which has just about the most spectacular cover art I've ever seen (design by David Baldeosingh Rotstein and photograph by Jon Shireman), can be found on Amazon.com through this link: Death Will Get You Sober