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.