Science fiction mystery novel, written by Chris McKinney and published by Soho Crime in 2021. It was the first book in McKinney's "Water City" trilogy, followed by "Eventide, Water City" and "Sunset, Water City," both released in 2023.
Our nameless protagonist is a police detective in 2142 Hawai'i. Forty years ago, Earth was almost destroyed by an asteroid dubbed Sessho-seki before the planet's greatest genius, Akira Kimura, blew it out of the sky with an orbital super-weapon. Akira remains one of the most popular people in the world, the savior of Earth, despite her reclusiveness. Our protagonist worked for her for many years as her main security operative and periodic assassin, and still considers her to be his best friend. After years of no contact, Akira contacts the protagonist about new concerns for her safety and asks him to stop by her home in the deepest seascraper in the Pacific Ocean -- and when he gets there, she's already dead, dismembered and frozen inside her hypertech hibernation chamber. But who would ever want to murder the woman who saved the world?
Of course, this is a neo-noir, so the answers don't come easily. There's the out-of-the-blue murder of our hero's lawyer -- and formerly, a close friend of Akira -- in a way designed to throw suspicion on the protagonist. There's the secret musical code that indicates that Akira had a secret daughter, and either killed her or wanted to find her and apologize to her. The police chief gets killed, the protagonist takes the fall, and gets thrown into a hellish underwater prison. And once the Big Bad stands revealed, it's a desperate chase to see if they'll be brought to justice or if even more people will die as the villain tries to recreate themselves as a god worshiped by the entire world.
For a guy who's never given a name, we actually learn a lot about the protagonist. For one thing, he's 80 years old and still plenty spry, thanks to life-extending technologies almost everyone has access to. He's also both colorblind and synesthetic, and the only way he can see red or green is if they're associated with either music or murder. He's been married a number of times -- which is far from uncommon when people can live a few decades longer. He lost one wife and child to a terrorist attack, and he doesn't have contact at all with several others. His current wife is Sabrina, herself a former cop, and they have a tremendously cute toddler daughter named Ascalon -- a name shared by Akira's super-weapon and by about half the women on Earth. He has a hot temper, and he might have gotten too comfortable working as Akira's pet assassin back in the day.
One of the great joys of this book is all the worldbuilding detail that gets worked into the story. The aforementioned hibernation chambers and seascrapers show up in the first few chapters, and every few pages, we get treated to some other piece of new technology or a strange historical event that has helped shape this world. We learn about how policing, prisons, and weaponry have changed, about the cell phone replacement that hovers next to you, ready to provide an automatic playback for anything that's happened to you recently. We learn a little about the disasters that have made most of the continental United States uninhabitable and how the technological marvels of the future continue to skip over the world's poor.
The book is full of fun characters, too. In addition to the protagonist, there's his long-suffering wife, Sabrina, who chooses to forego career benefits if it's going to mean selling her husband down the river. There's Ascalon, who really is spectacularly adorable. There's the antagonist, who has a terrifyingly powerful intellect and absolutely no other scruples. There are minor characters who still have an impact -- the dumb-as-a-stump police chief, Jerry Caldwell, lawyer and artist, and most importantly, Akira Kimura, a woman we never meet in the story but whose presence dominates the book. And the fact that we never get a solid confirmation of what kind of person she really was, what she loved, what she lied about, whether she was an angel or a devil, makes her all the more compelling.
My favorite thing about this book is how hard it goes in on the science-fictional future-tech -- man-portable railguns, teenagers dyeing their skin weird colors, a childhood therapy teddy bear called Life Coach Teddy, the seascrapers that reach from the surface of the ocean to its deepest depths, programmable artworks that can shift from one sculpture to another. And all that science fiction mixes incredibly well with the noir elements of the story, too. Sometimes the plot moves forward with the aid of technology, sometimes through deduction, intuition, and by being a hardboiled detective.
If you enjoy a good noir mystery mixed with excellent tech-forward science fiction, this book is something you ought to enjoy.
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