Please Do Not Ask for Mercy as a Refusal Often Offends
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Detective Kilroy is assigned to investigate a horrible murder. He's a fine cop, from the brim of his hat to the soles of his brogues, but his inquiries, far from solving the mystery, lead him into a deeper one—and to Cynthia, an enigmatic woman with a secret that could overturn Kilroy's entire world. But where is this world? It seems both familiar and uncanny, with electric cars, but no digital devices, and the audience for a public execution arriving by tram. Meanwhile, the seas are retreating, and the Church exerts an iron grip on society—and history. Power belongs to those who control the narrative. Kilroy is forced to take sides between the Kafkaesque state that pays his wages, and the truth-seekers striving to destroy it, all the while becoming besotted with a woman who may only love him for his mind—in an alarmingly literal way.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A detective investigating a murder unwittingly pulls back the curtain on his dystopian world in this thrilling sci-fi mystery from Davies (Dead Writers in Rehab). The residents of Landmass are the last inhabitants of Earth following a devastating flood hundreds of years earlier. Their religious teachings hold that they were saved by the gods Upstairs Mum and Dad and their son, the prophet Shadbold. After a man is publicly executed for blasphemy against these teachings, his widow,Wanda, turns up murdered and Detective Kilroy takes the case. Suspicion falls on Wanda's 13-year-old daughter, Sheba, and Kilroy is tasked with tracking down the missing girl but soon learns that his employers want Sheba for more than murder. She knows the truth about Landmass's creation myth; the world was saved not by gods but by power-mad scientists who now monitor its inhabitants from satellites. Though billed as darkly comic, there's very little humor in evidence to leaven Davies's grim, noir tone. The ending is disappointingly abrupt, but the intrigue and excitement of getting there makes this well worth the reader's time. Davies knows how to keep the pages flying.
