The Intuitionist

The noir aspects of this book, along with the the audacity of making elevator inspectors heroic, push this close to five-star territory for me. A joy of a book, with a black woman protagonist(!), a murder mystery where the victim is an empty elevator car; the joy comes when you slowly realize you're reading a fairly nuanced book on race relations in the United States.

This is Colson Whitehead's debut novel, and much more fanciful than his most recent books - not that that's a complaint. The Intuitionist is a hard-boiled, pulpy noir, almost postmodern story about conflict and corruption in the world of elevator inspectors as an allegory for the struggle for racial and gender equality, framed in a conflict between the two main factions of elevator inspecting, The Empiricists and the Intuitionists, and underpinned by the search for a legendary book about theoretical elevators. It's just as bizarre as it sounds, incredibly clever, and unexpectedly funny. Thank you @russell for the recommendation <3