Simone Pierce is a
private eye in New York City, only this is a New York populated only
in the tops of buildings which poke above a flooded east coast—the
polar ice caps have melted and the city is an island cut off from the
now-distant mainland, in effect what we know as Middle America is all
that has survived. Simone's got two jobs, one a seemingly routine
tail of a wayward husband, the other escorting a Spanish museum
curator around a number to the city's tallest buildings, to see what
may lie underneath the water. Then the husband she's tailing turns up
dead, and her former police colleagues like her for the killing.
Lev Rosen's dystopia
isn't unique, but using the setting for a detective novel is a nice
touch: there's an innate darkness in the cold water that surrounds
the remains of the city, giving the atmosphere, dare I say it? depths
of noir. Rosen also uses it in the way the best dystopian fantasies
are supposed to: as comment on our present day. Not just the
ecological, but more importantly, the social: New York has always
been an island home to those who don't fit into the mainstream of
society, as well as the HQ for said mainstream: now it's somewhat
different, isolated almost completely from a doctrinaire reactionary
and puritanical fundamentalist government on the mainland. That
Simone's best friend happens to be the mayor's top assistant, as well
as part of one of the city's wealthiest families, gives her an
interesting entree into both side of the equation.
The setting is
remarkably consistent, if the future itself doesn't always catch up:
for example devices like mobile phones don't seem to have progressed
as far as they seem to have in just the past couple of years, much
less a longer time, and you might assume surveillance would be far
intensified from the levels it is now. The story itself starts to get very entangled, to
the point it needs a somewhat cozy kind of parlour scene to explain
things; this is magnified by the character focus being very firmly on
Simone: and not always presenting a full-enough picture of those
being investigated.
In fact, Depth
reminded me of two rather disparate books. The story itself played
out like Harper, the movie version of Ross MacDonald's The Moving
Target. I kept seeing Paul Newman as Simone, or vice versa. But for
the combination of dystopian sf and hard-boiled noir, Rosen may have
produced the most satisfying mix since Richard Paul Russo's much
uner-valued Carlucci series. Although Rosen delivers a powerhouse
set-piece climax, the story does drag in the middle, but there is a
lot of depth in Depth, and Simone's return would be welcome.
Depth by Lev AC
Rosen
Titan Books £7.99
ISBN 9781783298631
NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)
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