MIDNIGHT, WATER CITY

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.