CLEAN AIR

It's 2042. Only a tiny sliver of the world's population is left—and there's a serial killer on the loose.

"Izabel had thought no one would kill another person again. Not after what they'd all been through." Ten years earlier, in an event now known as The Turning, the trees had released so much pollen into the air that simply breathing killed millions, including almost everyone over 60 and under 10. Izabel was working in a hospital morgue at the time, which is where she met her husband, Kaito. Now they have a 4-year-old daughter, Cami, and the family lives in a plastic dome in a town built on a slab and where transportation is provided by self-driving cars and a spiritual center offers weddings and funerals as well as counseling and tarot readings. The latter two play a major role in the plot, as do Japanese mysticism, messages from the dead, and possession by spirits. Izabel medicates her longing for the lost world by turning on reruns of America's Got Talent and The Backyardigans and pulling up news stories from 2017, when the planet seemed to be headed toward so many different disasters—but the revenge of the trees? No one saw that coming. Now some depraved person is killing whole families by slitting the walls of their plastic domes, and Izabel becomes so obsessed with the murders that she ends up in the middle of the police investigation, headed by a dry, bossy female federal agent named Inspector Paz. The strongest aspect of poet Blake's second novel, after Naamah (2019), is her worldbuilding, which is full of interesting details, from giant blueberries to privacy pods, but the writing is utilitarian, the character development, minimal, and the plot relies too heavily on mystical interventions.

A quick read with a timely premise.