The Night Market

Starred review from October 23, 2017
Moore (The Dark Room) sets this outstanding SF noir in a near-future San Francisco, where ocean current changes have made the rain nearly continuous, electric cars prowl the streets, and disposable LED postcard ads seduce the citizenry. When SFPD Det. Ross Carver and his partner, Cleve Jenner, answer a late-night summons to an expensive home, they find something odd: a man’s body “that looked like gray moss. Like a carpet of it spread across a rot-shrunken log.” Hazmat-suited FBI agents take over the crime scene and send the two to a portable decontamination unit. Ross awakens in his bed days later with his mysterious neighbor, the beautiful Mia Westcott, attending to him. He has no memory of that night, only the sense that something is wrong and a lingering metallic scent to guide him. Moore smoothly fills Carver’s quest for the truth with equal parts hidden menace and outright strangeness. This mystery feels like Blade Runner as if it were written by Charles De Lint or Neil Gaiman. Agent: Alice Martell, Martell Agency.

November 1, 2017
A sharp and scary near-future thriller that delivers a dark message about society's love affair with technology.After being called to an upscale home, San Francisco Homicide Inspector Ross Carver and his partner find a horror show, a dead body that's been eaten away by something that's left it looking like "gray moss. Like a carpet of it spread across a rot-shrunken log." The cops are still getting their bearings when they're ushered out by the FBI, hustled into a disinfectant chamber, then rendered unconscious. Carver wakes to find his mysterious neighbor, Mia Westcott, by his bedside, but he can't remember the past two days. Mia seems oddly eager to help him investigate, but he can't quite trust her. A game of cat and mouse, punctuated with gruesome murder, ensues, revealing a far-reaching, reprehensible plot. Moore's subtly futuristic San Francisco, beset by the buzzing of drones, crumbling buildings, and gangs of copper thieves, sets the ugliness of the physically and morally decaying city against scenes of ostentatious and very conspicuous consumption. A shocking act of violence at a luxury store between rabid patrons and out-of-control police officers is an eye-opener, as is one of the few things, besides the smell of ozone, that Carver remembers from his missing days: the Fairmont Hotel "draped entirely in black fabric, the gauzy cloth tied in place with red silk ribbons that circled the building." There are no easy answers at the culmination of Moore's unsettling, stylish noir, the third in a loosely connected trilogy set in San Francisco (The Dark Room, 2017, etc.). Good thing Carver isn't the type to give in or give up. The not-quite-nihilistic yet still utterly shocking revelations in the third act are the stuff of nightmares.You'll never look at a flock of sparrows the same way again.

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