Near Enemy

November 3, 2014
The dirty bomb that turned New York City into a wasteland in 2013’s Shovel Ready continues to have reverberations in this solid sequel. To escape the grittiness of reality, many of the wealthy lose themselves in the virtual world of the limnosphere. Former sanitation worker turned hit man Spademan ekes out a living in this bleak dystopia with odd jobs. One of Spademan’s targets is Jonathan Lesser, a “hopper” who is able to enter the fantasies of those suspended in the “limn” and who has made an amazing discovery: terrorists are attacking people in the limn, where killing a person is supposed to be impossible. To stop further attacks, Spademan begins an investigation that leads to a political fixer, an Egyptian radical, and a mysterious nurse. Sternbergh laces his second cyberpunk voyage with dark humor and eccentric characters, but plot nuances are hard to follow without having read the first novel. Agent: David McCormick, McCormick & Williams.

November 1, 2014
Spademan-the garbageman-turned-noir hit man introduced in Sternbergh's first novel, Shovel Ready (2014)-returns to save New York from a terrorist threat. Armed with nothing but a box cutter and the wits his mother gave him, Spademan meets the mysterious and brilliant Jonathan Lesser, who's been spending more time than is good for him in the limnosphere, a virtual reality where he taps into people's deepest fantasies. What he's recently witnessed there is both startling and seemingly impossible-a murder. Spademan's job is to track down the mystery of the victim (or "victim," since a murder couldn't possibly happen in an alternate reality) as well as to find Lesser, who disappeared shortly after his encounter with Spademan. A former cop and generally nasty piece of work named Joseph Boonce becomes extremely interested in both of these mysteries. Investigating the case, Spademan meets up with a nurse (named Nurse) who's employed to monitor the conditions of those plunging into the liminal world of the limnosphere. It turns out Nurse was with the alleged victim when the murder occurred. All of this action is played out in a postmodern and corrupt world of toxicity, both literal and metaphorical. Sleazy politicians and cops are rife, and Spademan rightly trusts no one in the public sphere. Other characters return from the first novel and provide a hint of nostalgia and sweetness missing from the dark and mean streets of New York. The machinations of all this sinister reality remain rather abstract and thus wind up having far more interest to Spademan than to the reader.

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Starred review from December 1, 2014
The crippled city can't live without its crutch. And what a crutch it is! In this equally compelling follow-up to Sternbergh's stunning debut, Shovel Ready(2014), New York City is still reeling from the aftereffects of a dirty bomb in Times Square. Midtown Manhattan is a ghost town, and the city's wealthy have found an alternative reality, the limnosphere, accessed through high-tech beds that allow sleepers to enter a dream world of their own choosing, far from the squalor of daily life. Even the limnosphere is not immune from chaos, however, as bed-hoppers are able to jump between beds, in effect, and either lurk around the edges of someone else's fantasy or, worse, disrupt the dream. Fortunately, though, you can't die in the limnosphere. Until now, apparently. Enter Spademan, the garbageman turned contract killer (weapons are in short supply so his lethal tool of choice is a box cutter) who sets out to fulfill a contract on a bed-hopper named Lesser, who may have unlocked the limnosphere's last secretits immortality. Lesser escapes the box cutter, but soon enough, Spademan is after bigger game. Have terrorists acquired the secret to murder in the limn, and are they soon to take away humanity's last hiding place? Or is the terrorist threat a ruse, covering up the plans of a power-hungry cabal out to rule both external and internal worlds? Spademan and an Egyptian radical, who some believe is the terrorist who cracked the limn, form an unholy alliance to . . . do what? Save the world, or what's left of it, or write its obituary, once and for all? The premise of Sternbergh's postapocalyptic world is so complex, so incredibly detailed, that readers necessarily must spend time struggling to get it straight in their heads. But, somehow, this only adds to the fascination of the novel. We're drawn deeply into the lives of the charactersboth those Spademan attempts to protect and those whom he hopes to killwhile at the same time feverishly trying to do the math on the limnosphere: you can't die in there, but you can be killed in your fancy bed and, thus, have the plug pulled on your dream? But what if you can die in the limn, or, alternately, what if you can live in the limn after you die in the world? Imagine your befuddlement in the early days of the Internet (How do those files get from here to there?), and then multiply that by infinity. Now you have some sense of what trying to sort out Sternbergh's world is like. As intellectually beguiling as the world building in Sternbergh's fiction is, if it were the books' main attraction, it's likely that only techno-geeks would be enthralled. The rest of us need people and action to keep moving forward. Fortunately, Sternbergh gives us both. When dystopian fiction works, it does so because we respond to the way human emotion can live even in a flattened landscape. That's the case here, with Spademan and his gang of postapocalyptic Holmesian irregulars scratching out lives with a moment of passion, a flash of humor, or an act of generosity in a world driven by survival. And let's talk action. The fight scenes in Near Enemy, especially those taking place deep in the limn, blend the operatic elegance of Bruce Lee in flight with the comic-book-inspired mayhem of Nick Harkaway in Tigerman (2014). Popular fiction that engages one's heart, mind, and adrenaline the way the Spademan novels do is something to be savored.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

August 1, 2014

Sternbergh triumphed with his debut novel, Shovel Ready, which stars a hit man in a futuristic postapocalyptic New York City. In this second novel, Spademan has been tasked with knocking off sleazy sleep-about Lesser but must change his plans. Warner Bros. is already developing Shovel Ready for Denzel Washington.

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