Titanium Noir - Hardcover

Harkaway, Nick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593535367 ISBN 13: 9780593535363

Verlag: Knopf Publishing Group, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

A virtuosic mashup of Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler by way of Marvel—the story of a detective investigating the murder of a Titan, one of society’s most powerful, medically-enhanced elites. • “Cross-genre brilliance from the superbly talented Nick Harkaway.” —William Gibson, New York Times best-selling author of Agency

"An exemplar of its genre, Titanium Noir twists and turns between excellent fun and deep melancholy." —The New York Times Book Review


Cal Sounder is a detective working for the police on certain very sensitive cases. So when he’s called in to investigate a homicide at a local apartment, he’s surprised by the routineness of it all. But when he arrives on scene, Cal soon learns that the victim—Roddy Tebbit, an otherwise milquetoast techie—is well over seven feet tall. And although he doesn’t look a day over thirty, he is ninety-one years old. Tebbit is a Titan—one of this dystopian, near-future society’s genetically altered elites. And this case is definitely Cal’s thing.

There are only a few thousand Titans worldwide, thanks to Stefan Tonfamecasca’s discovery of the controversial T7 genetic therapy, which elevated his family to godlike status. T7 turns average humans into near-immortal distortions of themselves—with immense physical proportions to match their ostentatious, unreachable lifestyles. A dead Titan is big news . . . a murdered Titan is unimaginable. But these modified magnates are Cal’s specialty. In fact, his own ex-girlfriend, Athena, is a Titan. And not just any—she is Stefan’s daughter, heir to the massive Tonfamecasca empire.  

As the murder investigation intensifies, Cal begins to unravel the complicated threads of what should have been a straightforward case, and it becomes clear he’s on the trail of a crime whose roots run deep into the dark heart of the world.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

NICK HARKAWAY is the author of four previous novels, The Gone-Away World, Angelmaker, Tigerman, and Gnomon, as well as a nonfiction work about digital culture, The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World. He is also a regular blogger for The Bookseller's FutureBook website. He lives in London with his wife, a human rights lawyer, and their two children.

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1

Giles Gratton, sick as a dog from nineteen years spent sleeping in the off hours between bloody murder rooms and the aldermen’s bullshit, doesn’t knock.

“Get your coat,” he says.

“Hi, Captain.”

“Yeah, all that.”

I get my coat and hold the door for him.

“Hi, Cal,” Gratton says.

We go down the stairs together. No need to waste a perfectly good bit of bad news with conversation.

We’re in the wrong part of town for something in my line. Not that it’s nasty, it’s just not perfect. The people I deal with are up there, not down here. Gratton drops me at the building but doesn’t come in.

“I’ve already seen it.”

“You got any idea?”

He shakes his head. “Just that it’s your thing.”

“Confirmed?”

“No, but if you get in there and you think I’m wrong, you can keep the money and go back to bed.”

I walk through the lobby and take the stairs up to the third floor. Every single step is shiny clean and smells of off-­brand Limonene.

Inside the apartment, the dead nerd lies on the floor. There’s a hole in his head, small and smudged with grey ash and a light burn. A close-­range shooting: an execution or a suicide. There’s some blood, blowback from the moment of impact, but the round must still be inside him. Small calibre, low power. Just enough to do the job.

Down by his feet, Musgrave the city doctor is fussing with a tablet: the police network is achingly slow. Other than that there’s not a lot going on. Murder rooms are like train stations at midnight, not much left to do before the last departure.

The nerd looks about forty-­five with no habits. He’s got dark hair cut nerd style, he’s wearing a nerd shirt, button-­down, with little hooks for a clip-­tie stitched under the collar. Nerd slacks too high at the waist and too short at the ankle, and nerd shoes from an artisan place in the market, with orthotic inserts. The thick soles complete the anti-­chic vibe. This was how he lived, wardrobe like an old guy and no mind to be anything else.

There’s a lounge chair in front of the big window. I figure he sat there and looked out, so I go and do that too. I can feel the ghost of him in the cushions, pressed down and permanently shaped by his weight. Forensics have come and gone ages ago, but still the other three twitch slightly as I sit because they’re not allowed to, not allowed so deep they can’t imagine that anyone would.

“You want to get a snack while you’re at it?” Detective Felton, standing by the door, doesn’t love my way of being in the world. We got nothing to discuss, so I don’t.

Outside, the city spreads east and west along the lake. The Chersenesos district juts out into the deep water from midtown, a dog’s muzzle lapping from a massive bowl. Behind the skyscrapers the mountains rise up from the farthest shore. Othrys is topographically an alpine lake: the line from the peak to the trench is smooth, and the water is as deep as the mountains are high. Anything you throw in falls for a clear four thousand metres to a cold darkness that keeps its secrets well and never lets them go. Anything, or anyone.

“Oh bloody fucking fuck,” Musgrave growls at her tablet. It’s not true what they say: good workmen do indeed blame their tools, at least when they have to use what the department can afford. Felton and his uniform buddy can’t even be bothered to laugh. Just two of them: there’s a serious incident in the Heights. There always is when you need one. Gratton giving me space—­or maybe rope.

I go back to the desk and run my hand along the flat surface. It’s clean and cold. There’s a university terminal, a block of cartridge paper by the printer. The drawers have bamboo dividers to keep everything in its proper place: one cubby for staples, one for rubber bands, one for pens. There is nothing, but nothing, out of place in this room, in this entire apartment, except for the nerd who owns it, dead between the display case and the fish tank.

Koi carp, two, one orange, and one orange and white.

I shuffle all the way back on the dead man’s office chair until my feet come off the floor and then I push off with my right hand so that I’m spinning slowly around. The chair is a science chair, translucent and nasty. They take a seed from your ear cartilage and grow it and then you sit in it because something something immune response something biota. Supposedly it’s good for you, but who knows? High-­ticket item. Round and round I go in the dead nerd’s chair, which I guess is technically part of the corpse.

“Hey, Musgrave, you gonna autopsy this chair?”

“Nope.”

“Because you know—­”

“Yes I do. Technically it’s still alive so it would be a vivisection, but let me say again: no, I do not at this time propose to vivisect the chair, because I have an annual budget and it’s fucking ridiculous.”

“Just figure it’s made of his body. If he was maybe poisoned—­”

“He was shot in the head,” Musgrave says, like she doesn’t really want to talk about it any more.

There are no family pictures around the terminal, or on the mantel, or in the display case. There are none in the living room with its view of the harbour, thirty-­six storeys down. There are none in the bathrooms. There is a box in the lumber room full of bric-­a-­brac, and no doubt he intended, one day, to go through it and set some of those things out. Or perhaps he just didn’t give a damn. Sometimes you keep things because you don’t have time to throw them away.

Alastair Rodney Tebbit, went by Roddy. This address plus a teaching room on campus. Not married, at least for the present. Manicure his only obvious vanity, and a bullet somewhere in his skull: one shot between the ear and the temple, right through the stem and bounced off the concave bone on the far side. The gun is the one he bought yesterday morning, smaller than my palm. The credit card slip is still on the side table where he dropped his keys. Swiss made, with no digital parts. It comes with a spring holster: you twitch your wrist in a particular way and the gun pops into your hand. Another high-­ticket item, and fine, he had the cash and not a lot to spend it on, but most of the stuff here is ordinary. Only the chair, the shoes, and the gun are expensive. Roddy Tebbit did not impulse buy, and he did not bother with needless things. He spent money on stuff that mattered, and the gun mattered.

Still spinning in the chair. Look up, look down, look around. There is no part of the crime scene that is not interesting. Cobwebs on the ceiling, but they’re new. I can see the spider working. No dirt anywhere else except the tiny blush of ejecta on the carpet where he died, and the diffuse grime that settles wherever humans live, the little tracks of a thousand daily journeys from kitchen to lounge chair to bathroom to bedroom that Roddy Tebbit will not be making ever again.

I roll the chair back and open the drawers. There are two on top of each other, one shallow and one deep. The first one is full of things to write with. Pencils, hard. Pencils, soft. One box of a half dozen in solid graphite. Then pens. Pens, blue. Pens, black. Pens, red. Trifecta. Sharpies, indigo, and only indigo. Personal quirk. The notes on the cartridge paper are in indigo. Nice colour.

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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593535367
• ISBN 13: 9780593535363
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 235
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar