The Preserve

June 29, 2020
A murder mystery in a world ruled by robots drives the plot of this entertaining if overstuffed near-future dystopian tale from Winter (Barren Cove). Humans are granted Preserves to rebuild their society without the presence of robots. Police Chief Jesse Laughton leaves a high-stakes job in the Baltimore PD for a quiet life on the SoCal Preserve. But then a member of the fledgling community is murdered. When the murder within the Preserve is linked to a series of robot murders on the outside, Jesse’s former partner, a robot named Kir, comes to help Jesse crack the case. If Jesse and Kir can’t find the killer, the robots will consider the Preserves a failed experiment and invade. Winter bites off more than he can chew thematically, leaving little space to explore the implications of the myriad issues he raises. Allusions to America’s history and how it led to the novel’s present and the implications of humanity going extinct while the robots they created thrive jockey for space with the relationship development between Jesse and Kir and the fun, twisty mystery. Though this is an enjoyable yarn, it doesn’t satisfy its own ambitions. Agent: Chelsea Lindman, Sanford J. Greenburger Assoc. (Nov.)Correction: The author's last name was misspelled in an earlier version of this review.

September 15, 2020
In a world ruled by robots, a police chief races to solve a murder on a reservation set aside for humans. Jesse Laughton is chief of police for the newly created SoCar Preserve, a designated area for humans spreading out from Charleston, South Carolina. After a plague almost wiped out humankind, highly sophisticated forms of AI took control. It's been nine months since the preserve was populated by people, and no one has been murdered. Until now. The body slumped in the alley behind a grocery store is that of Carl Smythe, who turns out to be a cyborg (a human with a robotic arm and leg) and a hacker who developed and sold something called sims. The sims are illegal programs that are the robot equivalent of heroin or hallucinogens--they provide a one-time thrill that can be addictive. The last thing the dedicated Laughton wants on his turf is robot interference with law enforcement, but now it's inevitable. He's not at all surprised when his former partner from the Baltimore police department shows up. Kir is a robot so finely designed he's barely distinguishable from a human, except when he does something like mend a shotgun wound by twisting a few wires in his shoulder back together. Kir is also probably Laughton's best friend. It turns out he's not even there about Smythe's murder, although it may be connected to five robocides he's investigating back in Baltimore. Winter does his worldbuilding gracefully, weaving the details of this future into the investigation as it builds rather than veering off into long blocks of exposition. He also grounds the story in Laughton's family life. His wife, Betty, is dedicated to two subversive causes: She helps run a school to educate human children and a fertility clinic to grow the population ("A Baby in Every Belly"). Laughton's relationship with his 8-year-old daughter, Erica, is a believable bond of loving exasperation. One quality humans and robots still share is prejudice toward each other, and Laughton and Kir must struggle with that to solve the case. Robots may not be so different from humans in this fast-paced futuristic mystery.

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November 1, 2020
From the author of The Twenty-Year Death (2012) and Barren Cove (2016) comes a mystery set in the not-too-distant future. A man has been killed. Not just any man: a cyborg, which complicates matters for police chief Jesse Laughton. Should he treat it as a homicide or as a robocide? After all, murders of humans are pretty rare nowadays (if only because humans themselves are rare after a near-extinction-level event years in the past), while murders of robots are on the upswing, what with them being the dominant species on Earth. Teaming up with his former partner, the robot Kir, Laughton fights villainy, bigotry, and bureaucracy to track down the killer. The novel has thematic echoes of Isaac Asimov's R. Daneel Olivaw stories, C. Robert Cargill's Sea of Rust, and Daniel H. Wilson's Robopocalypse, but at the same time it carves out its own niche, presenting a postapocalyptic world that is technologically robust (quite similar to our own, in many ways) and socially complex. Fascinating and, with its talk of organized anti-robot groups and "human supremacists," definitely relevant to today's readers.

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