The assassination of the vice president of the United States leads a New York City police detective to uncover a political conspiracy and a struggle for world domination in Mitchell’s debut dystopian tale, set in the near future.

In 2057, Detective Nick Garvey’s latest case is hush-hush: the unpublicized murder of Vice President Jerome Wellsley and four Secret Service agents in New York. But the top priority for Nick and his partner, Tim Branson, is to protect President Lenora Allison. Nick has a good idea of who would want to have her dead: Jason Beck, the supreme director of the World Council, which, after acquiring the majority of the world’s oil, rules over multiple countries. President Allison, it turns out, is a potential threat to the Council’s control; she’s planning to activate a system, involving a 30-year-old Japanese satellite, that will convert the sun’s energy into electricity for the whole of Manhattan. Nick’s ex-partner, Gerry Martin, who’s now a World Council employee, is a source of inside information. Unfortunately, Beck soon becomes aware of what Gerry and Nick are doing. The detective already has his hands full with his estranged daughter, Sandra, who blames him for her mother’s death and wants to keep him from his 7-year-old granddaughter, Nicole; she’s also latched onto an abusive man named Delmar Pillsbury. As Nick unravels the conspiracy, it will likely put Nick—or someone close to him—in serious jeopardy. Although the novel’s dystopian setting is well-described, it’s first and foremost a detective story. As the gleefully convoluted plot unfolds, Nick slowly uncovers a mystery that involves even more murder; he also detects signs of probable sabotage of the electrical grid, and he eventually exposes a tangled scheme involving, among other things, a curious metal box and a man thought to have died years ago. But Mitchell’s vision of the future in this work seems more alarmingly realistic than those in other sci-fi tales, with law enforcement being an especially striking facet of it. Official city policemen (or “pro cops”) like Nick are a dying breed; the Council’s Pop (short for “Population”) Police are so feared by communities that they’ve taken to safeguarding themselves with their own “paracops.” Mitchell’s environment of World Council domination and surveillance often feels claustrophobic, and it’s literally so when he has Nick traverse dark, underground tunnels with someone in pursuit: “Nick counted twenty faint heartbeats and decided he could wait no longer. Ten steps. Twenty. Twenty-five. No further sounds.” The characters aren’t easily defined, even by their actions; some that initially appear to be Nick’s allies eventually turn out to be something else entirely. There’s surprisingly little violence, although the novel is not without its grimmer moments; dog lovers, in particular, should proceed with caution. But Mitchell contrasts these with bits of tenderness (as when a number on a truck sparks a memory of little Nicole) and humor (as when Tim’s electronic video tablet is deemed “ancient”).

A beefy police procedural with well-developed sci-fi and espionage touches.

In the future, the remnants of a dictatorship which once ruled the planet use a lab-created virus and planned social unrest to target their enemies in Mitchell’s dystopian SF sequel.

This follow-up continues the story begun in Sundown: Engineering Gives the Devil a Sunburn (2017). In March 2058, Earth is still building back up after the previous year’s overthrow of the World Council, a murderous organization whose vile “supreme leader from hell” Jason Beck ruled via police-state tactics, including assassination and surveillance. Nick Garvey, a no-nonsense veteran police detective in New York City, had joined with President of the United States Lenora Allison, a hands-on leader who doesn’t shy away from a fight, in an investigation that exposed and destroyed the generation-long reign of the World Council. But victory came at a price. Beck is presumed dead, but a new mystery fiend called Ishmael has risen to prominence in what remains of the regrouping World Council. Now, the evildoers resort to bioterror and blackmail, first unleashing a deadly, engineered plague with strategically placed cures. This is just a foretaste of a second, even deadlier pestilence, which comes with a demand from Ishmael for the forces of justice and democracy to surrender. A key target of the World Council’s revenge is the glass-walled showcase community of Friendship City, an amalgam of Brownsville, Texas, and Matamoros, Mexico, designed to set an example of model citizenship, racial harmony, and civic responsibility for other nations to try out on their own troubled borders. Garvey, Allison, and other key allies find themselves inside Friendship City, dealing with waves of crime and violence instigated by World Council infiltrators and collaborators as the plague threat looms.

Mitchell relates this tale in short, staccato sentences that are reminiscent of Jack Webb’s narration in the classic cop show Dragnet. Garvey is a similarly familiar type of fearless cop, common in thrillers, who can seemingly shrug off any damage that’s inflicted upon him. However, he is a bit of an unusual player in the action-hero department, as he’s a grandfather whose family spends much of the adventure right alongside him—either willingly or unwillingly; the good guys here have an alarming tendency to suddenly drop their guards and make themselves vulnerable at strategic moments, but, then again, so do the villains. One subplot deals with Garvey’s estranged, now-comatose daughter who hated him for meting out punishment to a scoundrel uncle, which she may or may not remember when she wakes up. Perhaps the biggest payoff here is the “BORO,” or the Bill of Rights with Obligations, reprinted in full in the appendix, which lays out the ground rules for behavior and administration for all residents of Friendship City; it brings the material into line with the work of such SF grandmasters as Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein, who were wont to include civics and social-responsibility instruction in their fictional worlds. The conclusion leaves the door open for another sequel.

A familiar but sometimes-offbeat SF action thriller complete with a prospectus for good government.