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Product Description
L.A.: the sparkling metropolis at the new center of what's left of the civilized world. Here wealthy men and women seek forbidden thrills through a system that enables them to indulge safely and anonymously in their wildest fantasies through the use of computerized simulations known as prowlers. Then a young executive at one of the world's most powerful corporations is brutally slain and an ex-information cop named McNihil is called in to find the dead man's still "living" prowler.
McNihil knows he's walking into a trap. But he wants a chance to redeem himself for a botched job that forced him into retirement years ago. Teamed with a ruthless female operative called November, McNihil is about to enter a world in which no one can be trusted and things are far worse than they seem...a world in which a vast conspiracy of evil is about to blur the razor-thin line between the sane safety of daylight and the dark danger of Noir.
Amazon.com Review
Imagine a fast-moving computer game set in the black-and-white environment of a 1940s detective movie and you'll begin to get some idea of the mixed metaphors that fill the air in K.W. Jeter's difficult but ultimately rewarding new futuristic thriller.
Jeter, who also writes a series of novels based on the popular Blade Runner film about apocalyptic Los Angeles, centers Noir in that same city, now a dark jewel of the dominant Pacific Rim. A detective named McNihil (yes, you got it) has had his eyes surgically altered so that everything looks like an early Bogart movie to him. "Gray newspapers with significant headlines--'Dewey Defeats Truman,''Pearl Harbor Bombed'--moldered in the gutters, or were nudged along the broken sidewalks by the same night wind that cut through McNihil's jacket," Jeter writes about the scene of a plane crash where the detective has been summoned by a corporate villain. A top young executive has been murdered, and McNihil is arm-twisted into tracking down the dead man's missing "prowler"--a computer simulation that roams the world like an electronic ghost. Aided by a young woman called November, whose fingertips are alive with lethal magnetic currents, McNihil brings his--and Jeter's--unique noir vision to bear on a world that for all its weirdness is the ultimately believable extension of our present-day nightmares. --Dick Adler
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