A simple interpretation of "Chekhov's gun," a literary device made popular by author and playwright Anton Chekhov, is that if there's a gun in a story, at some point somebody should fire it. In other words, every detail in a story, no matter how small, should exist to move the narrative along. Even if the hypothetical gun is never fired, its very existence could be used to create an unnerving atmosphere crucial to the story. There are plenty of guns, metaphorical and real, in Eric Glick's The Dog At The Signpost. However, in the metaphorical sense, some get fired and some don't.

The Dog At The Signpost, Glick's debut novel, is best described as the story of a man who suddenly doesn't know what to do with himself. Joe Berzinski lives alone, daydreaming of his wife and trying to piece together why she walked out on him one morning with no explanation. He struggles to get through work, failing to meet the expectations of his particularly demanding boss, an ex-military man with questionable people skills. And he finds himself attracted to a waitress who unfortunately turns out to be his wife's lesbian lover. One day, however, while en route to visit his father in the hospital, Berzinski meets a mysterious man who, like Tyler Durden in Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club, hands over his phone number and changes everything. Sort of.

With The Dog At The Signpost being his first novel, Glick, who lives here in D.C., set his sights pretty high by attempting to inject a study on mid-life crises into a mystery novel. The characters are fleshed out nicely, and you can't help but sympathize with Berzinski, who finds himself in some incredibly awkward situations. But there's a "whodunit" element to the story that feels tacked on — potentially interesting but ultimately relegated to secondary status.

A lot of things happen between Berzinski's meeting with Reed Devonshire — the mystery man — and the moment Devonshire is finally unmasked. The characters become entangled in each others' lives in ways that appear to be orchestrated by some higher power. But it turns out that Glick is the only mischievous power at work, as Devonshire is left to create intrigue in the final pages of the novel that largely doesn't exist through the bulk of the story. In fact, you could argue that Devonshire is an unfired gun, occasionally used by Glick to create misdirection instead of moving the story along. If Devonshire were removed entirely, the story would still be able to stand after some minor adjustments.

The Dog At The Signpost is by no means a confusing or poorly plotted novel. Glick is a writer with a great ear for dialogue and an understanding of character development. It's the main characters we care about, and the novel's weaknesses only occur when Glick attempts to inject conspiracies involving shadow organizations and people who aren't what they seem into the mix. In the end, the author provides some nice closure for his characters and the reader. We'd like to read about what happens next with Joe Berzinski, but next time, hopefully we can we leave all those guns behind.