THE SHAMSHINE BLIND
by Paz Pardo
In a near future where Argentina triumphed over Britain in the 1982 Falklands War, an ambitious small-town American cop tries to unravel a case that could cost no less than her mind.
High, high concept meets classic detective fiction in this debut, which manages to turn noir into a multicolored rainbow of psychedelia. Argentine American novelist Pardo imagines here a world where wars are long since lost and street battles between biotech, drug dealers, and the fuzz are fought with paint guns, albeit of a psychotropic variety. Agent Kay Curtida works for a federal law enforcement branch dedicated to policing “psychopigments,” a hallucinogenic dye developed by Argentine military scientists that’s now strictly regulated for medical and military use but has naturally found its way into the American drug trade. “So it’s like paintball, but with feelings?” asks a brochure. “Sure. But any way it gets inside you—sinking through your skin, breathed in through your mouth, or eaten—it’s going to give you some gnarly emotions.” Curtida, a depressive herself who needs Sunshine Yellow to function, is hoping to break out of her small Silicon Valley territory (big cities having been wiped out in some kind of global conflict), so when an old pal from the academy gives her a lead on a black-market cartel, she hopes it’s her entry into the big time. As Curtida and her green cadet partner pound shoe leather running down leads, it’s not so much the mystery that thrills as much as the weird world that envelops Curtida, herself a notable improvement over your average White guy gumshoe. As the conspiracy involving a radicalized scientist named Priscilla Kim, guerrilla fighters dubbed the People’s Pigment Movement, and a prototypically evil biopharma corporation unravels, this thriller ironically loses the plot from time to time, but given the phantasmagoric playground grounded in very real, painful emotions, readers are likely to enjoy the ride just fine.
A heady, deep-dyed debut that suggests more thought-provoking work to come.