[Book Review] Midnight, Water City

 Midnight, Water City / Chris Mckinney

The world we live in has been changing alarmingly, with record breaking temperatures, forest fires, storms, flooding, and landslides, while billionaires play compete with each other in a space race.  Midnight, Water City gives us a future that's not so far fetched, imagining how the world may be future reshaped and going from there.  The apocalypse has happened, the land poisoned, the seas rose, and humanity endured and adapted, building down into the depths of the sea.

The story follows a man who for years protected the woman who saved the world from an extinction level meteor event.  The years have not been kind, years lengthened through advances in medicine and science, more years to make mistakes.

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.

This post-apocalyptic noir begins with the death of our "femme fatal," setting hooks into our investigating narrator that threaten to drown him as he uncovers secrets that were never meant to see the light of day.  At the center of it all is the fallibility of the mortals we elevate to godhood, the fictions that make up the soul of our society, and the toll of endurance.

Advance Reader Copy courtesy of  Soho Press in exchange for an honest review; changes may exist between galley and the final edition.