Midnight, Water City
Ratings5
Average rating3.8
15
Ratings5
Average rating3.8
Hawai‘i author Chris McKinney’s first entry in a brilliant new sci-fi noir trilogy explores the sordid past of a murdered scientist, deified in death, through the eyes of a man who once committed unspeakable crimes for her.
Year 2142: Earth is forty years past a near-collision with the asteroid Sessho-seki. Akira Kimura, the scientist responsible for eliminating the threat, has reached heights of celebrity approaching deification. But now, Akira feels her safety is under threat, so after years without contact, she reaches out to her former head of security, who has since become a police detective.
When he arrives at her deep-sea home and finds Akira methodically dismembered, this detective will risk everything—his career, his family, even his own life—and delve back into his shared past with Akira to find her killer. With a rich, cinematic voice and burning cynicism, Midnight, Water City is both a thrilling neo-noir procedural and a stunning exploration of research, class, climate change, the cult of personality, and the dark sacrifices we are willing to make in the name of progress.
Featured Series
3 primary booksThe Water City Trilogy is a 3-book series with 3 primary works first released in 2021 with contributions by Chris McKinney.
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Contains spoilers
I actually really enjoyed this book. It's very much a noir mystery, in that there's large swaths of the book where we get a lot of introspective thought trips through our protagonist's history, views, and character insights. Normally that sort of unfiltered thought dialogue drives me up a wall, but I thought it worked well for this setting and didn't entirely bog me down in detail.
Our protagonist (whose name we never find out) is an aging police detective, who hears that an old client of his during his head of security days, the scientist-cum-savior-of-the-world Akira Kimura is fearing for her life, so he drops in to see what he can do. And finds her dead.
That's basically it for the plot, as is tradition for a lot of detective noir stories. Where I thought this book shined was in the rich detail of the world. It's a far future Earth where we have underwater sea houses, AI personal assistants, and a whole host of cultural issues associated with climate change and classism. I really loved that we got to know this Earth so well through the eyes and thoughts of our nameless protagonist.
There's also a bit of (thematic/character spoilers here) unreliable narrator aspect to this that I appreciated, where our protagonist maybe isn't as upstanding as we're led to believe. And hanging over the entire book is the was-there-wasn't-there aspect of the Sessho-seki Comet that was a nice touch.
This one gave me brain food, and I like it for that. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but if an introspective sci-fi-themed detective noir story gets you interested, give this a shot.
