FOR THE LOVE OF MAGGIE O'DIE

Curbo’s SF thriller finds a young man waking from a coma only to be thrown into the middle of a missing-persons mystery.

In an unspecified future San Francisco, Simon Silibus, a “caretaker of friends,” has christened a comatose associate with a new name: Ryger Deacon. A fugitive from the law, Simon must keep his friend safe as he undergoes “the change”—a method of life extension that returns a person’s DNA to a younger state. Waking up with coma-induced amnesia, Ryger struggles to remember his past even as he’s informed that he is a private investigator and given a new task by Maggie O’Die, the wealthy, elderly owner of All-Bio, the company responsible for life extension technology. Ryger is directed to find Maggie’s missing husband, Sam, and her granddaughter, Cara, who is next in line to inherit Maggie’s fortune. As Ryger attempts to piece together his past, he must navigate company politics and the constant threat of “Trackers,” a cryptic and deadly group that targets anyone pursuing unregulated life extension. When Maggie herself goes missing, and a mysterious girl shows up who may or may not be the real Cara, Ryger must use all the futuristic tools at his disposal—including a memory-stimulating pearl—to crack the case. In this ambitiously intricate novel, the author manages to mostly hang onto the various plot threads. At times, particularly when discussing the Trackers, “mystery” strays into “vagueness,” but the open-endedness of the novel’s conclusion indicates this may be intentional. Clean writing and brisk action keep things moving forward as Curbo shares thoughtful insights into the nature of humanity in the face of its future and its past: “We exist in a world of connections to other people. As we grow old, our connections stretch and thin. We look for familiar faces in every new place we go. We see these new people in the light of people we once knew.”

A twisty SF mystery that weaves together intriguing futuristic concepts with a classic crime-noir feel.