Robbie Brownlaw is an San Diego homicide detective who is called in to investigate the apparent suicide of an investigator for the city's ethics commission. Given the city's ethics could use quite a lot of investigating, and that the deceased formerly worked for the SDPD Internal Affairs Division, he had plenty of enemies, and consequently there are plenty of reasons to suspect the suicide is a set-up. Brownlaw sets about systematically checking out every possible lead, learning along the way that the victim had a trove of blackmail material connecting powerbrokers to a high-priced prostitution ring. He's good at his job, but he has one advantage he hasn't revealed to anyone. A few years ago he was thrown from a sixth-floor window of a burning building by a disturbed man and barely survived; ever since he has had synesthesia, a neurological condition that makes sounds take on color and shape. This is an imaginative adaptation of an uncommon but well-documented bit of neurological arcana, cleverly adapted to a crime fiction setting. In Brownlaw's case, his synesthesia makes people's emotions, revealed in the sound of their voices, visible as colored shapes. For him, it acts as a crude sort of lie-detector. Robbie Brownlaw is a terrific character - a genuinely nice guy whose brush with death made him aware of what matters. In some ways it distances him from people who are caught up in chronic restlessness, always searching for something more, something better, and there's a touching loneliness about him at times. Knowing whether someone is lying, or frightened or sad doesn't necessarily mean Brownlaw can connect to them. But he's determined to solve the case in front of him, and watching him proceed, step by step, makes The Fallen both a solid police procedural and a fascinating character study.