3.5 stars.
After a severe pandemic, populations are vastly reduced, and conventions and traditions are damaged, perhaps irrevocably. No one has been spared, and everyone has someone(s) to grieve for. Two years have passed, and though there are still small outbreaks, it looks like the pandemic has finally mostly been beat. There is a name for those who managed to survive, the Luckies, and there is a range of beliefs amongst them, from continued vigilance against infection, to complete flouting of safety measures.

Polly, a.k.a Rags, and Flint move to the small town of Canary to rebuild their lives. Flint is a software engineer, while Rags is a journalist. She’s in town to take over the Editor-in-Chief position at the local paper, while Flint is eager to start work on his military contract (something he’s hiding from Rags). Both have endured much loss during the pandemic, and hope to restart their lives; their relationship started during the pandemic, and they're wondering who they are now to each other now that life is seemingly returning to normal.

Almost immediately upon starting at the paper, Rags earns the ire of a coworker, and some members of council and the local health officer, Piper. He is missing the days when he was in power, and everyone was frightened of contracting the infection. Piper is not happy the importance of his role is diminishing.

Rags quickly runs afoul of Piper; she has no desire to continue following the safety measures put in place some years earlier. Rags is also reluctant to inquire into the case of a missing teen in town, even though as an investigative reporter, she should normally be intrigued by a teen whose disappearance is not easily explained away as running away.

Others, such as the town council, and Piper, want Rags to focus the paper's stories on what they tell her is important. In fact, it becomes apparent quickly that these people, want to control the running of the town through inflaming fears of a new infection and this just rubs Rags the wrong way. Rags begins using her platform to protest against the town's tightening health measures. Then, another teen disappears, and meanwhile, we get the POV of the town's first disappeared teen, who recounts the horrifying situation she’s in.

Eventually, Rags begins investigating the missing teens, while the town council decides to impose restrictive laws on its population.

What I didn't like about this book:
-I felt a wee bit confused differentiating characters, and could not get a good sense of who some of the people were.
-Rags and Flint were the only two given any significant attention to character development. Others were a little too thin or, in the case of Piper, too moustache-twirly to feel like believable.
-Rags' attitude to continued safety measures was both understandable and a little concerning. Everyone is tired of prevention after years of fear and isolation. But I also had a problem with Rags' belief that any safety measures going forward were nothing more than performance. This felt a little too much like the attitudes of people who refused to follow any health directives or take into consideration the vulnerability of many during COVID.
-I thought Rags’ about face regarding investigating the teens’ disappearances to be a little too swift.

What I liked about this book:
-I liked the way people had developed a bartering system; so much has changed because there just aren’t enough people to maintain the pre-pandemic systems or conventions.
-Rags is dismissive of others’ feelings, often rude, and unwilling to confront her own feelings of loss. She’s sometimes abrasive and unsympathetic, making her developing willingness to connect with people to investigate the disappearances welcome.

On balance, I liked this book's fast pace, and the idea of how people might pick up after a devastating pandemic. The reasons behind the disappearances were pretty horrifying, and I’d be interested in finding out more about how the system for the kidnappings was set up.

Thank you to Netgalley and to Regal House Publishing for this ARC in exchange for my review.

DNF. I'm having a hard time remembering what this book is even about. Just didn't stand out to me, and could use another round of professional edits. it takes really good writing to get me into a pandemic book so soon, and this just didn't hit the mark.

Thank you to NetGalley for this advance copy.

I was intrigued by The Potrero Complex after first hearing about it, and after reading this novel: it didn't disappoint. Think Twin Peaks meets the pandemic (and Twin Peaks is one of my fav shows, so this is a high compliment). I was super engaged throughout, and loved the characters.

Journalist Rags moves to a small town to start afresh after covering a terrible pandemic in the city over the past 5 years. Effie Rutter, a teenager is missing and Rags learns that life in the small town will not be as simple as she thought.

There was nothing wrong with this hook per se, it just wasn’t my kind of book and reading about another pandemic was a little depressing!

Wow. This one REALLY surprised me in the best way. The vibe is "Twin Peaks meets year 2020". While not as quirky as Lynch's masterpiece it does have a small dysfunctional town, a cast of complicated characters, and an engrossing mystery involving a missing cheerleader.

When Polly "Rags" and her partner Flint roll into the small town of Canary it's like they have washed ashore from a shipwreck. The major city they fled, (I assume Baltimore) is functioning under a fascist-like government after a five year long global pandemic dubbed "The Big One" that eliminated most of the population. Their plan to escape to the simple life in a small town to rebuild is thwarted when things aren't very idyllic there either. People are desperate to cling on to what feels normal but behind the scenes everyone is drowning in their own misery. Rags gets pulled into a missing persons case that unravels everything and everyone around her.

I loved how Bernstein built this world and while slightly futuristic it is centered in things we can easily relate to. The ending felt a tiny bit fast for me but wrapped up really well. I was really pulled into this quickly and got desperate to know how it would end. Once I started I did NOT put this book down until I was done.

The Potrero Complex takes us to a dystopian near future in which the world is reeling after years of a pandemic even worse than Covid-19. The journalist "Rags" Goldner and her partner Flint, a computer data expert, both of whom have lost family to the contagion, have left behind big-city life in the hopes that small-town life in Canary, where Rags has been offered editorship of the local paper, will be better. Well, it's not better. A teen has disappeared, soon followed by another; the few remaining townspeople are dispirited and not very friendly (or in fact downright hostile), and Rags soon gets into disputes with the town leaders about her reporting, her refusal to keep wearing a mask and checking her temperature, and much, much more.

This is an interesting book to read at the present moment in history, given that it addresses matters of pandemic response, human trafficking, incipient fascism, hacking and data mining, personal privacy, indigenous rights, and even how couples under stress navigate their relationships.

Does it succeed in all it attempts? I'm not sure. It did hold my interest, but I often felt as if I was reading a small portion of a larger work, and that there was an awful lot that was never clarified or wrapped up. To take a somewhat trivial example, we learn that Rags is legally Polly, but we never learn why or how this journalist in her early thirties came to be known as Rags, or for that matter why she was named Polly (not exactly a common baby name in the late 1990s). We don't have to know why re either name, but the reader does wonder, and there are other, much more significant matters that remain unexplained or unresolved at the end of the book, so by the end a reader may feel that not quite enough has been told about some of these things (I'm avoiding spoilers here).

This is a generally well-written tale that will appeal to fans of dystopian fiction and others who may be wondering what could lie in store for us in the next few years.

Highly recommend!! My first book to read by this author but definitely not my last!! Uniquely and beautifully written, this story and its characters stay with you long after you finish the book.

The book is set after a global pandemic. It follows the story of Rags the journalist and her partner moving out of the big city to a small town…. Beautifully written and I got really invested in the story. I would highly recommend reading this one.

This was a good read, it was well written with a good plotline and well developed characters that kept me engaged the whole way through. This was such an interesting read especially give the recent experience of a pandemic it made this book easy to relate to, and with the state of the world at the moment this book was very believeable.

Warnings
Repeated references to Nazis and the Holocaust.

Plot
The book is set after a global pandemic. It follows the story of Rags the journalist and her partner moving out of the big city to a small town, where she's taken over as the sole editor of the local newspaper. A local teenager goes missing and Rags decides to pursue the mystery and find out what's happened.

Story
The story sold in the overview is focused on a missing teenager, but the book seems to focus more heavily on post-pandemic safety measures, and how the main character takes offence to these regulations. I found there to be too many tangents for the main ‘missing teen’ storyline to be compelling.
There's a lot of world building and description that doesn't really add to the story, to the point that I found it very difficult to persevere through to the end. I also never warmed to any of the characters, and they almost all start on the defensive with one another, so I didn't really warm to any of the relationships either.

Critiques
There are some very odd turns of phrase, for example, ‘hates clutter like a healthy person hates cancer’.
The author draws false equivalences, comparing the police and government to Nazis throughout, and comparing a pandemic to the Holocaust on multiple occasions.
There's one character with they/them pronouns, which I thought was great, but this slips on a couple of occasions to 'his', which was disappointing and could have been easily spotted and amended.
"She could tell by the shoulder length light brown hair and slight build that this was a woman…" - disappointing assumption of gender.

Overall I think this book is written in very bad taste. It reads as a story against lockdown rather than a mystery of a missing teenager. I wouldn't recommend it.

Content warning:
Animal cruelty, animal death, death, grief, kidnapping

This was a good read, it was well written with a good plotline and well developed characters that kept me engaged the whole way through. This was such an interesting read especially give the recent experience of a pandemic it made this book easy to relate to, and with the state of the world at the moment this book was very believeable.