With Lookout Cartridge, Joseph McElroy established a reputation as one of contemporary fiction's foremost innovators and deft observers into the fissures of modern society. It is a novel of dazzling intricacy, absorbing suspense, and the highest ambition: to redeem the great claim of paranoia on the American psyche.

In trying to figure out just who is so threatened by an innocent piece of cinema verité filmed in collaboration with a friend, Cartwright finds himself at the heart of a mystery stretching from New York and London to Corsica and Stonehenge. With each new fact he gathers, both the intricacy of the syndicate arrayed against him and what his search will cost him become alarmingly clear.