Midnight, Water City

Starred review from April 26, 2021
Set in the 22nd century, this exceptional mystery-SF hybrid from McKinney (The Tattoo), a trilogy kickoff, boasts impressive worldbuilding and a classic morally compromised lead thrust into a high-stakes homicide investigation. In 2102, Earth was almost destroyed by an asteroid, but the brilliant scientist who detected it, Akira Kimura, was also able to invent a cosmic ray that prevented the disaster. Forty years later, she contacts her former head of security, an unnamed investigator with a unique form of synesthesia, now on the police force, because she fears her life is in danger. After the investigator arrives in her underwater home at the bottom of the world’s largest seascraper, deadly solar flares having led many to seek safe havens in the oceans, he sees green, a sign for him of murder, coming from the sealed hibernation chamber humans have been using to rejuvenate themselves. Inside, he’s shocked to find Akira’s frozen and cut-up corpse. The path toward the truth behind the murder is satisfyingly complex, yielding a logical, if gut-wrenching, solution. Comparisons to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the inspiration for the movie Blade Runner, are warranted.

May 1, 2021
McKinney opens his futuristic Water City Trilogy with a slice of post-apocalyptic noir even darker and more stylized than Blade Runner. Called to Akira Kimura's penthouse in the undersea mansion of Volcano Vista to provide personal security for his old friend, the nameless narrator finds his prospective client flooded with nitro and dismembered inside her hibernation chamber. It's a grim fate for the most famous person in the world, the scientist who back in 2102 spotted the asteroid Sessho-seki on a collision course with Earth and overcame the relentless objections of people like NASA scientist Dr. Karlin Brum to launch the Ascalon Project, whose cosmic ray split The Killing Rock into halves that darted off in different, non-Earthbound directions. But it's far from the most bizarre thing that will happen to the narrator, an 80-year-old detective who served as Akira's bodyguard while she worked on the project. Over the next week he'll quit his job during an interrogation by his boss, pull a thermal blade on Akira's wealthy grad school friend Jerry Caldwell, get arrested for murder when Jerry's killed soon afterward, submit to another interrogation by Sabrina, the fourth wife he mentored when she was a rookie cop, and enlist his friend Akeem Buhari to accompany him on a midnight visit to Akira's mausoleum to fulfill her last request: that he find the daughter she abandoned years ago and apologize to her. The landscape is so densely imagined in both technological and political terms (think class warfare and cellphones on steroids) that it's no easy task to concentrate on the self-tormenting hero, who reflects that "violence is when I'm most in tune with my flow," or his investigation. Even the most ardent readers are more likely to turn the last page exhausted rather than eager for the sequels.

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June 1, 2021
In this first installment of a projected sf noir trilogy set more than a century in the future, humanity is still pulling itself back together after a near-catastrophic event. Akira Kimura, the woman who quite literally saved the world, is dead: murdered. The narrator has known the victim for decades; he used to be in charge of her personal security. Now he's a cop, and he's determined to nail her killer. Although it has plenty of science-fiction elements (personal artificial intelligences, massive undersea living complexes), this is at its heart a traditional murder mystery, much in the same way Ben H. Winters' The Last Policeman (2012) was a cop story set in a science-fictional environment. McKinney gives us a grisly murder; a cop with a history of violence; a surly, dim-witted police captain; an assortment of unsavory supporting characters; and some really effective twists. Readers who like mysteries with a futuristic feel will love this one, but the novel also works as straight-up sf.

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