EXTREMITY

A disgraced detective comes out of retirement to help her former partner, and an eager rookie investigate the double homicide of a billionaire…and his clone.

In London, three Metropolitan Police officers conduct postmortem interviews about the impossible case they’ve just solved. Alternating perspectives lay out the facts: DCI John Grossman drags his ex-partner Julia Torgrimsen out of forced retirement to analyze the murder of Bruno Donaldson, a nasty billionaire with whom she’d crossed paths while working deep undercover in her past life. As a handler for the late Dmitri Yegorov and his cabal of unsavory associates, Julia procured human trafficking victims, including one young woman whose tragic fate still haunts her. An assassin has shot Donaldson—but across the city, an identical double is also found dead. The case triggers Torgrimsen’s past regrets, even as she stubbornly brings green DC Mark Cochrane into the fold to chase the shooter across town. When they discover the billionaires are hoarding time machines that are responsible for the bizarre doppelgängers, all three are tempted by the roads not taken. An SF novella about the ultrawealthy and their clones could reasonably be assumed to be in conversation with Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, but Extremity as a title is a bit of a red herring. It’s not about the clones being extensions of their prime selves, but rather about humanity reaching too far in its greed and Earth ultimately paying the price. The narrative framework is engaging but underused as the three stories basically line up, failing to generate sufficient tension about the evening’s outcome. While Binge’s longer works like Ascension are stunning in their scope, this tonally uneven adventure stumbles before it really gets started.

A too-slick police procedural about fixing past mistakes could use more time.