Exploded View
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
It’s 2050, and LAPD Detective Terri Pastuzka has drawn the short straw with her first assignment of the new decade. Someone has executed one of the city’s countless immigrants, and no one (besides the usual besieged advocacy groups) seems to much care. Even Terri herself is already looking ahead to her next case before an unexpected development reveals there’s far more to this corpse than meets the eye.
And a lot already meets the eye. In a city immersed in augmented reality, the LAPD have their own superior network of high-tech eyewear—PanOpts, the ultimate panopticon—allowing Terri instant access to files and suspects and literal insertion into the crime scene using security footage captured from every angle the day the murder occurred. What started as a single homicide turns into a string of unsolved murders that tie together in frightening ways, leading Terri down a rabbit hole through Los Angeles’s conflicting realities—augmented and virtual, fantastically rumored and harrowingly true—towards an impossible conclusion.
Exploded View is the story of a city frozen in crisis, haunted by hardship and overwhelmed by refugees, where technology gives everyday citizens the power to digitally reshape news in real time, and where hard video evidence is impotent against the sheer, unrelenting power of belief. After all, when anyone can forge their own version of the truth, what use is any other reality?
Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this clumsy debut, McPheeters attempts to combine science fiction with a gumshoe adventure. Terri Pastuszka is a jaded LAPD homicide detective worn down by the futility of policing a city that's struggling to recover from a thermonuclear war. She is guided by the PanOpts system, wearable technology that monitors the jurisdiction. Terri cares little for the victims in her cases, or any other human beings. When she is assigned to investigate the murder of a refugee, she is drawn into mystery that extends through unrelated lives and brutal deaths, and which may end in her own demise. McPheeters fills the first third of the novel with dragging exposition about virtual reality, too fascinated by that idea to reveal his characters or their motivations. When he finally presents the more interesting crime procedural, it is a sharp relief from the tedium that preceded it. The resolution, once again tied too tightly to PanOpts, negates the high-stakes adventure he has created for his characters. Though the mystery is solved, the solution is as empty and meaningless as the technology it's based on.
