Depth

May 15, 2015

Most of New York City is underwater, but a PI like Simone Pierce can still make a living as long as there are cheating spouses. Simone thinks she's tailing another cheater, but the mysterious blonde he meets with doesn't seem interested in romance, and the detective's quarry later ends up dead. Her ex-boyfriend cop wants to ask her questions about the dead man, so it's a relief to have a client whose one wish is for Simone to show him around some of the sunken buildings of the city. But this is noir, so nothing is simple as it seems. VERDICT Simone is a female detective in the Kinsey Millhone and V.I. Warshowski mold: tough, tenacious, and pragmatic. The real star of this noir take on dystopia is the crumbling, barnacle-encrusted landscape of New York, where the ocean has risen 20 stories and homes and businesses are either partially flooded or floating. Rosen's (All Men of Genius) future world is a dark place, reshaped by intense climate change and suffering under dogmatic religious fanatics.

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