THE IMPOSSIBLE DETECTIVE

Reiss introduces Mark St. Johns, better known as The Falcon, heir to a master sleuth’s legacy and detective for a most unlikely client.

Abani Singh, who says she saw a man run over twice by a car without a driver, insists that Mark, who lives nearby on New York’s Upper West Side, should investigate. It makes perfect sense that she’d come to The Falcon, who’s been dubbed, like his celebrated late grandfather, the impossible detective because he specializes in solving impossible mysteries. What makes her claim even more remarkable is that she’s a 12-year-old child who seems to have been targeted by Desmond Hodge’s non-human killer as well. At first Mark doesn’t believe her, but the more he digs into the incident over the objections of Dr. Nageena Singh, Abani’s protective mother, the more the facts seem to bear out her wild story. As Mark works to persuade Det. Brian Benish, his old grade-school nemesis, of the urgency of the case, God’s Hands—an apocalyptic cult under the dubious leadership of self-styled prophet Kendrick Rainey, whom the Lord speaks to directly—is upping the stakes by moving toward executing a shadowy but unmistakably sinister scheme featuring “an AI that builds other AIs by itself.” Abani’s combination of pointed questions and sharp insights leads The Falcon to promote her from his client to The Sparrow, his apprentice. He’ll need all the help he can get to head off a crime that’s at least as impossible as he is. That’s what everyone thinks until they come face to face with its horrors.

An entertaining doomsday scenario that you’ll wish was more impossible than it ends up seeming.