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One of my worst nightmares has always been finding myself framed for a crime I didn’t commit. I can feel the desperation in that situation as real as a stomach ache.

In Gary Garth McCann’s new novel, The Man Who Asked to Be Killed, characters aren’t framed for crimes, but they’re caught in a quicksand of circumstances over which they have little or no control. Figuring out how to cope with these circumstances reveals—both to themselves and to others—who they really are, which is often not who they thought they were.

The protagonist, Buddy Smith, appears to be a nice young man who’s working as trustee of his cousin Mac Roren’s law practice while Mac serves as Governor of Maryland. Buddy’s home life has been rough, at best. He’s never known his father, and his brother disappeared nine years earlier. He’s engaged to be married, but he’s never quite gotten over his feelings for Kat, a woman he knew in high school who is now married to Mac.

As the novel opens, Buddy is traveling to Annapolis with Mac’s sister, Thea, who is CEO of a pipeline supply company she and Mac inherited from their father. Stopped at a gas station and innocently pumping gas into her car, Thea is killed by a drive-by assassin. Despite the fact that two other people have recently been killed in drive-by shootings, Mac is certain he knows why Thea was murdered. Buddy tells him that if he has any information about Thea’s murder, he has to tell the authorities, but Mac refuses.

When Buddy continues to insist, Mac eventually reveals that going to the police will likely get him killed just like Thea. The truth is that Mac and Thea’s father let members of a drug cartel use the company to launder money. When their father died, the drug dealers forced Mac to let them continue the operation, but insisted he not tell Thea. Soon Thea suspects something is amiss and hires a private investigator, which leads to her murder.

With this revelation, the quicksand that surrounds Mac creeps closer to Buddy. Still trying to maintain his integrity, Buddy asks Lester, another cousin of Mac’s who’s a criminal lawyer, to go with him to the U.S. attorney’s office to share what they know about Thea’s murder without implicating Mac. Lester agrees to take Buddy to see a friend of his in the office, but later it becomes clear that the man they meet is not a U.S. attorney. The situation becomes murkier.

Meanwhile, as Buddy tries to do what he thinks is right for Mac, his estranged brother—or someone who looks like his estranged brother—begins to pop up in odd places around town. Buddy’s mother even thinks her older son has slipped into her apartment and helped himself to food. Another strange occurrence happens in the neighborhood when one of Buddy’s mother’s neighbors, who looks a bit like Buddy, is shot and killed while he’s out walking his dog.

Mac decides he and Buddy need to get away for a while, so he talks Buddy into spending a short vacation with him in the Caribbean. A drunken tryst with two women at the resort turns out to have graver implications than the typical one-night stand when one of the women is murdered the next day. Although Buddy has tried to help Mac from afar, he’s slipped neck deep into the complicated tangle of events. Not only does he begin to worry about his own life, his fiancée leaves him when she learns about the sex in the Caribbean.

Classified as a mystery/thriller, The Man Who Asked To Be Killed delivers boatloads of action on nearly every page. Composed in the short chapters of the genre, the story kept me turning pages, trying to unravel the complex plot. As Buddy is trying to deal with the dangers of Mac’s shady business associates, his mysterious brother keeps inserting himself into Buddy’s life, raising questions of connections and coincidence.

One of the most appealing aspects of The Man Who Asked To Be Killed is that although McCann fills it with action, he also spends time developing the characters, so that most of them are not one-dimensional. Buddy and Mac, in particular, have many sides to them. Buddy despises Mac’s criminal behavior, but he knows he’ll always be there for his cousin: “Mac was the only male whose blood I shared who had ever given a damn about me.”

As the quicksand pulls harder and the desperation increases, events spiral to an explosive conclusion. The question is who will be left standing.