Book received from Netgalley and Bold Strokes Books for an honest review.

I chose to read this book because I really liked the cover. It reminded me of the wood-chipper scene in the movie Fargo. The blurb sounded interesting too. A sci-fi/futuristic murder mystery set in icy, snowy conditions with lesbians and aliens 200 years from now. Sounds like a good mix, right? There were definitely parts with merit and some interesting concepts but on the whole I struggled to enjoy it when my reading was consistently jarred with inconsistencies.

In this future, climate change has caused Winter to be a nine month long season with temperatures around minus 25 and lower with the constant threat of storms. Humans have emigrated to other planets, aliens have immigrated to Earth and xenophobia is still rife. Lieutenant Leah Samuels is called to crime scene in a park where she is faced with the gruesome sight of what looks like numerous bodies pulped and sprayed across the snow. 

Later she and rookie cop Peony Fong (from the planet Zing) return to the precinct with Leah driving. An impression is given that vehicles lanes are stacked vertically and that they are flying “sixty feet off the ground” (you’d think America would have taken to the metric system in 200 years), however, for the rest of the book they seem to be firmly on the ground. There is a scene when they travel up a one-way and the oncoming vehicle refuses to move so they push it out of the way into a snow bank. Why didn’t they just fly over it?

I couldn’t work out if this future was hi-tech or low-tech. If there is interplanetary travel the technology must be fairly advanced but when they go out into the snow they’re bundled up with ordinary jackets, coats, hoodies and scarves. No nanotechnology spidey suit that shrinks or expands to fit complete with environment control? There is very little description of any new technology of the future besides the murder board which seems like a smartboard. Same old coffee machine, note pad and pen? People still have paper photographs in frames and warrants are hand-delivered on paper.

Leah rushes off to set up a secret task force to deal with the park murders because of some sense of paranoia but there is no indication of why she would be paranoid. A bishop seems to be one of the murder victims but there is nothing said about him that would require a need for treading lightly. In fact, he was respected and liked and if anything, the whole police force should have been on the case. Nobody says anything or does anything to Leah to cause her to want to work away from the police station yet off she goes with two fellow officers to a secure location provided for her by her secret, billionaire, alien wife.

I felt like I was on the periphery for most of the novel and I have no clear idea of what any of the characters looked like, not even the aliens. It was almost like it was assumed the reader would know what the world looked, what the people looked like and what type of person they were. In the beginning there was a nice interaction between Leah and Weston (bad cop) but it was short-lived and one of the few instances of clarity.

I think parts of the murder mystery could have been good if I didn’t have all these extraneous questions tapping at my brain. Some of them are still there lurking. Who opens the door barefoot and in a t-shirt when the temperature is minus 35 with a fast approaching blizzard and argues with the people standing outside? Would surveillance tapes still be called tapes? Why is fuck spelled phuc sometimes and fuck at other times? And who or what is Drude?