Exploded View

September 5, 2016
In this clumsy debut, McPheeters attempts to combine science fiction with a gumshoe adventure. Terri Pastuszka is a jaded LAPD homicide detective worn down by the futility of policing a city that’s struggling to recover from a thermonuclear war. She is guided by the PanOpts system, wearable technology that monitors the jurisdiction. Terri cares little for the victims in her cases, or any other human beings. When she is assigned to investigate the murder of a refugee, she is drawn into mystery that extends through unrelated lives and brutal deaths, and which may end in her own demise. McPheeters fills the first third of the novel with dragging exposition about virtual reality, too fascinated by that idea to reveal his characters or their motivations. When he finally presents the more interesting crime procedural, it is a sharp relief from the tedium that preceded it. The resolution, once again tied too tightly to PanOpts, negates the high-stakes adventure he has created for his characters. Though the mystery is solved, the solution is as empty and meaningless as the technology it’s based on. Agent: Scott Gould, RLR Associates.

In the Los Angeles of 2050, a detective struggles to solve a mystery that threatens her understanding of the truth in McPheeters' (The Loom of Ruin, 2012) second solo novel.Terri Pastuzka is in some ways your stereotypical hard-bitten detective: divorced, depressed, and alcoholic. But she's also an LAPD homicide detective in a future where cops use PanOpts--smart sunglasses hooked into a nigh-omnipresent surveillance network--and she lives and works in a Los Angeles that's been flooded by enormous numbers of refugees from a nuclear India-China war. Between the technology's pervasive impact on both detective work and the general culture and the social ramifications of a downtown LA taken over by an impoverished minority, there's fresh ground to tread here. Like all good crime thrillers, the story begins with a murder (unfortunately, more than 40 pages in). Terri investigates the death of a "nobody" Indian refugee, but when the trail leads to a different, high-profile murder, she becomes embroiled in politics, the public eye, and a rising body count. Her hunt for answers brings her into direct conflict with a "post-truth" society, where narrative trumps facts, and Terri discovers that everyone--and everything--she trusts may be lying to her and that everything she loves is threatened. It's a tense and paranoid ride to the truth...and a somewhat anticlimactic villain reveal. All the same, the book's powerful themes--the relationship of police to policed, trust in governmental authority, trust in the media, immigrant tensions, and generational change--are sharply executed, and the groundwork is well-laid for a possible sequel. Though McPheeters takes a bit to find his stride (and belabors his technological exposition in the meantime), the story is worth the wait and might just leave you hesitating before taking the next reblogged video at face value. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 15, 2016
McPheeters' second novel delivers on the promises of The Loom of Ruin (2012) with a futuristic police procedural that echoes themes by Philip K. Dick and Charles Stross. LAPD detective Terri Pastuzka uses augmented-reality gear (eyewear called PanOpts) to handle what turns into a series of murders connected by a single weapon and an absence of motivational connections. The Los Angeles of 2050 is haunted by a nuclear exchange between India and China that has filled its abandoned skyscrapers with unwanted refugees. The same high-tech gear that allows police to use ubiquitous camera footage to recreate murder scenes is also used by ordinary citizens to create entertainments that blend cinema, documentaries, and home movies as backgrounds to mundane lives. As the body count increases, Terri realizes that she can no longer trust her technology, because when anyone can forge their own version of the truth, knowing what is real becomes a leap of faith. The suspense here builds to a satisfying conclusion resonating with authentic emotion and a profound question about life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)