Set in near-future Hong Kong, this novella fuses elements of police procedurals, crime thrillers, and SF tales.
Chronicling an aging homicide detective’s quest to apprehend a serial killer before the investigator retires (or is fired), the story begins with Zeki Pemburu, who is tasked with solving multiple murders in which the victims’ bodies have been ritualistically dismembered and rearranged. All of the killings have occurred in Lower New Kowloon, essentially the dark underbelly of a prosperous city where very little sunlight, money, or opportunities trickle down to the area’s impoverished inhabitants. With pressure mounting from his boss to stop the killer—and to use the cutting-edge technology that the department has embraced (cybernetic modifications and drones)—Pemburu decides instead to use highly illegal tech to identify the murderer. By accessing a recently deceased person’s neural chip, the detective can experience the victim’s last moments—but in doing so, he risks insanity or worse. While Pemburu is little more than a crime fiction stereotype, this narrative works in large part because of Todoroff’s exceptional worldbuilding and the story’s powerful thematic punch. The author’s focus on creating a rich and meticulously described setting makes for an undeniably immersive reading experience: Pemburu “stepped out of the alley into a torrent of people and traffic, all surging through a neon-bright canyon cliffed in steel and smartglass. Celebrities smiled down at the masses, endorsing hot ware that could sync and sex up anyone to be just like them. Holograms swam in a smog of bio-diesel and steam, spiced with curry and hot peanut oil, all buoyed on a hurricane of sound.” And for such a short work, Todoroff insightfully explores profound themes, namely technology’s influence on humankind and the power (or lack thereof) of faith: Pemburu “told her religion was an appendix, a vestigial organ from when humans tried to swallow the indigestible.”
Fans of cybernoir should enjoy this futuristic murder mystery—two (augmented) thumbs up.Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 94
Publisher: Kindle Direct Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: SCIENCE FICTION | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION | CRIME & LEGAL THRILLER
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Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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Twenty years after Chloe Davis’ father was convicted of killing half a dozen young women, someone seems to be celebrating the anniversary by extending the list.
No one in little Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, was left untouched by Richard Davis’ confession, least of all his family members. His wife, Mona, tried to kill herself and has been incapacitated ever since. His son, Cooper, became so suspicious that even now it’s hard for him to accept pharmaceutical salesman Daniel Briggs, whose sister, Sophie, also vanished 20 years ago, as Chloe’s fiance. And Chloe’s own nightmares, which lead her to rebuff New York Times reporter Aaron Jansen, who wants to interview her for an anniversary story, are redoubled when her newest psychiatric patient, Lacey Deckler, follows the path of high school student Aubrey Gravino by disappearing and then turning up dead. The good news is that Dick Davis, whom Chloe has had no contact with ever since he was imprisoned after his confession, obviously didn’t commit these new crimes. The bad news is that someone else did, someone who knows a great deal about the earlier cases, someone who could be very close to Chloe indeed. First-timer Willingham laces her first-person narrative with a stifling sense of victimhood that extends even to the survivors and a series of climactic revelations, at least some of which are guaranteed to surprise the most hard-bitten readers.
The story is sadly familiar, the treatment claustrophobically intense.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-2508-0382-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
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