THE LAST HUMANS

In the distant future, the eerie, ultra-policed city of Coldgarden is under attack from all sides. The walls of the city, formerly known as Calgary, have been attacked for more than 90 years by revenants—“mutable, insectile” beings that also crawl in through Underguts, the tangle of tunnels that lie beneath the city. Real glass that can shatter is rare in Coldgarden, as even the slightest wound can trigger Mutagen Prime, a hypermutation that sends the body “spiraling off into biological madness,” growing excess bone and muscle at a gruesome, fatal rate. Iazmaena “Iaz” Delgassi, the newly elected Magistrate of the city’s Watchfire ward, is still celebrating her win when she finds her boyfriend, Damon, dead by apparent suicide in their apartment. Signs point to foul play engineered by Gene Sequencing, the all-powerful government body tasked with investigating Mutagen Prime. Iaz joins forces with her best friend, scientist Stefani Palmieri, as well as sketchy “data-jockey” Rieve Revolos and plucky, Underguts-savvy orphan Marri, to avenge Damon and uncover the truth. When Iaz is suddenly promoted to the mayoral position of acting archon, she’s uniquely positioned to pry into century-old secrets. Author Little spins a familiar SF conceit into an excellent hard-boiled detective novel, complete with a hard-drinking, morally gray former cop leading the pack. The characters are beloved archetypes that shine in this setting, where the seen and unseen terrors of Coldgarden are chillingly described: “The revenants boiled in, tearing through stubborn compglass like it was rotted cloth…. They rose like a surging tide, articulated gemstones of death.” This series debut reads like a sequel at times; readers are immediately plunged into the thick of ward-specific city politics, and events that precede the events of the book are excessively referenced one moment and forgotten the next. Genre-savvy readers will find the final plot twist predictable, but it delivers a clever heartbreak and clearly sets the scene for the trilogy’s remaining installments.