Places in the Darkness
Chris Brookmyre
Orbit, £8.99
Even taking into account his virtual reality novel, Bedlam, Brookmyre is exploring new territory here by going full-on sci-fi and setting his latest noirish crime novel on a space station. Not all his fans will be pleased by this departure, but Places in the Darkness turns out to be a resounding success, Brookmyre adapting to the demands of science fiction as though he’d been writing it all his life.
It’s set aboard Ciudad de Cielo (CdC), a space station in high Earth orbit shaped like two rotating wheels connected by an axle. Its ultimate purpose is to develop spacecraft which will eventually carry the human race out to colonise other star systems. At this point, that’s still a distant prospect, but it’s the ideal on which CdC is founded: the human race at its best, striving to be better still.
The reality, however, is sleazy entrepreneurs smuggling in booze for CdC’s numerous bars, wages so low that many supplement their income with prostitution and, down on the most inaccessible levels, at least one fight club. Sergeant Nikki Freeman, known as “Nikki Fixx”, is a disillusioned former LA cop whose idea of keeping the peace in her sector involves some very loose interpretations of the letter of the law. Over time, her method of law enforcement has evolved to look a lot more like a protection racket.
Still, it’s worked reasonably well so far. There has never been a murder reported on CdC, so there’s no need for heavy policing. But the delicate balance is about to be shattered by the discovery of a ghoulishly dismembered corpse and the simultaneous arrival of strait-laced, idealistic Alice Blake, who has been sent there to determine if Earth needs to exert greater oversight on CdC’s police. As the body count rises, Nikki Fixx is starting to look like a symptom of the very rot that Alice Blake wants to stamp out. So who better for Blake to attach herself to, in the guise of naïve rookie “Jennifer Cho”, to get an accurate picture of what’s really going on?
Brookmyre follows a tried and tested pattern of throwing two natural antagonists together and pitting them against each other until they develop a mutual respect and team up to fight a greater threat. The setting could be the Wild West, or Prohibition-era USA, in space. And yet the sci-fi trappings ensure that we can never predict exactly where he’s taking us. The hardware all CdC citizens are equipped with – contact lenses streaming information from a central database – seems only a step or two more advanced than our current phone technology, but its implications point to something just beyond our ken that’s worth committing murder to keep secret. And it allows Brookmyre to explore questions of memory, identity and the human condition that wouldn’t have been possible in a more down-to-earth setting.
With two strong lead characters, a few inventive twists and a pinch of metaphysics driving it forward, it’s to be hoped that this won’t be Brookmyre’s last foray into a genre he seems eminently suited to.
ALASTAIR MABBOTT
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