THE NEKOV SYNDICATE

in Jacomet’s YA SF series opener, an adolescent girl living on the streets stumbles into a team of police investigators from another dimension on the trail of a conspiracy.

In Columbus, Ohio, unhoused orphan Kes Gatner fell through cracks of social services after her foster family gave her up and moved away. Now she lives rough and resourcefully on the streets. When Kes tries to pick the pocket of Jack Boundang, a tall, strange man, he turns out to be a detective—and not just any detective, but one who works for the police force of Jheer, a smallish world in another dimension (not a parallel universe, Jack emphasizes). Superior Jheer technology has long made clandestine teleports back and forth between Jheer and Earth a possibility. Interactions between humans and Jheer folk (who include a race of single-sex reptilian humanoids called thimps) are in a legal gray area—the Jheer are not always good about obeying rules. Twenty-seven years ago, a ruinous class-tinged civil war on Jheer concluded with the rebels defeated. Now an upstart gang, the Nekov Syndicate, has dispatched its operatives, led by disaffected dimensional scientist Edward Thoxx, to Columbus, where they systematically case houses constructed 27 years earlier by a Jheer front company. What can they be seeking? And in which world does the homeless Kes rightfully belong? Twists and turns are minimal in this caper, which emphasizes characterization over story gimmicks (even putative villain Thoxx begs for compassionate understanding) and establishes ground rules and characters for presumed future installments. One compelling but undercooked idea is the conceit that Jheer people innately have varied superpowers—but in “about one in ten million” instances, an unlucky “insipid” is born mundane, with no paranormal talents. Glib, fast-thinking Jack is such an unfortunate, but he refuses to let that hinder him. Jheer (thimps notwithstanding) does not seem particularly exotic; it’s the notion of Columbus, Ohio, as a nexus of SF weirdness that’s the novelty. Jacomet writes in a solid, non-condescending YA voice and, at least here, eschews any contrived romantic angle.

A plucky orphan, dimensional gates, and snake-people cops mix in this surprisingly straightforward story.