Shadow Ticket

Shadow Ticket is a novel by the American author Thomas Pynchon. It was announced by Penguin Press in April 2025 and released in October 2025.^[1] The novel, which is set in 1932, centers on a Milwaukee private investigator who is set adrift in Hungary while tracking the heiress to a Wisconsin cheese fortune.^[2]

Shadow Ticket

Author	Thomas Pynchon
Language	English
Genre	Postmodern detective
Published	October 7, 2025 (2025-10-07) (Penguin Press)
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Hardback)
Pages	304
ISBN	978-1-59420-610-8

The novel is his tenth work and his first in 12 years, since Bleeding Edge in 2013.^[3][1]

Plot

In 1932, Hicks McTaggart is a private detective in Milwaukee tasked with finding Daphne Airmont, a dairy heiress who has disappeared with a clarinetist. McTaggart becomes entangled in Mafia politics, Nazi sympathizers in Chicago's German-American community, and FBI schemes to sabotage Roosevelt and suppress left-wing politics. His search carries him to Central Europe, where he confronts conspiracies involving a rogue U-boat, secret communities, and occult machinery. In the end, the upheaval in America culminates in a coup, and the novel closes with Hicks’ surrogate son Skeet traveling west.^[3]

Reception and interpretation

In a 2025 review written for The New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz noted the novel's prescience during Trump-era "Pynchonesque America". In her mixed review, she noted the lack of a clear message: "At some point, though, meaning that is sufficiently cryptic becomes indistinguishable from no meaning at all".^[3]

Dwight Garner in The New York Times also gave the novel a mixed reception. While enjoying Pynchon's wordplay, he found that the author's "timing and reflexes are not what they used to be" and called the novel "the least notable thing he's written".^[4]

In The Guardian, reviewer Xan Brooks noted that Pynchon, "albeit wryly and slyly", in the novel seems to connect the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe with the current times in the US, but found the novel "an antic mixed bag, a diverting tour of old haunts" that "runs wide but not deep".^[5]

More positively, Megan Nolan in The Telegraph called the novel "a masterpiece": "The fact that Shadow Ticket is brilliant and prescient isn’t a surprise; that it exudes so much joy and sensuousness is. To have had the career Pynchon has had, and still be so invigorated by your work, is all any novelist can ask."^[6]

Kirkus Reviews said "Pynchon did the private dick thing to better effect in Inherent Vice (2009), a superior yarn in nearly every respect, so this one earns only an average grade — but then, middling Pynchon is better than a whole lot of writers’ best."^[7]