Midnight, Water City
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4.1 • 14 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Hawai‘i author Chris McKinney’s first entry in a brilliant new sci-fi noir trilogy explores the sordid past of a murdered scientist, deified in death, through the eyes of a man who once committed unspeakable crimes for her.
Year 2142: Earth is forty years past a near-collision with the asteroid Sessho-seki. Akira Kimura, the scientist responsible for eliminating the threat, has reached heights of celebrity approaching deification. But now, Akira feels her safety is under threat, so after years without contact, she reaches out to her former head of security, who has since become a police detective.
When he arrives at her deep-sea home and finds Akira methodically dismembered, this detective will risk everything—his career, his family, even his own life—and delve back into his shared past with Akira to find her killer. With a rich, cinematic voice and burning cynicism, Midnight, Water City is both a thrilling neo-noir procedural and a stunning exploration of research, class, climate change, the cult of personality, and the dark sacrifices we are willing to make in the name of progress.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in the 22nd century, this exceptional mystery-SF hybrid from McKinney (The Tattoo), a trilogy kickoff, boasts impressive worldbuilding and a classic morally compromised lead thrust into a high-stakes homicide investigation. In 2102, Earth was almost destroyed by an asteroid, but the brilliant scientist who detected it, Akira Kimura, was also able to invent a cosmic ray that prevented the disaster. Forty years later, she contacts her former head of security, an unnamed investigator with a unique form of synesthesia, now on the police force, because she fears her life is in danger. After the investigator arrives in her underwater home at the bottom of the world's largest seascraper, deadly solar flares having led many to seek safe havens in the oceans, he sees green, a sign for him of murder, coming from the sealed hibernation chamber humans have been using to rejuvenate themselves. Inside, he's shocked to find Akira's frozen and cut-up corpse. The path toward the truth behind the murder is satisfyingly complex, yielding a logical, if gut-wrenching, solution. Comparisons to Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the inspiration for the movie Blade Runner, are warranted.
