You wait for years for Edinburgh-based augmented reality crime fiction, then two come along at once.
The Edinburgh here is not as far ino the near future as The Night Sessions and the motive isn’t religion, it’s money. A robbery takes place in a thinly-disguised World of Warcraft, baffling the police and the auditing company brought in to investigate.
The consultants bring in their own consultants and the cast of characters expands. There’s an interesting narrative device where each chapter is told from the perspective of a differet character in the second person, so there’s a kind of rota of yous who act out the events. It sounds confusing but I rather liked it, it felt absorbing. Imagine If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller with computer games.
There are a lot of film noir elements, so there’s a patsy programmer brought in, supposedly by a recruitment consultancy who scan a company’s internal correspondence to identify needs, then scans the web to find matches in online CVs (I’ve heard far worse ideas for digital start-ups), but in fact there are more sinister groups in the background.
Interests and partially-revealed facts rise and fall through the pages, pushing forward only to be shown to be a mask for something else or a dead end on the deductive path. The robbery itself becomes secondary to the real crime, the one over there that’s only exposed thanks to the first crime. I need Humphrey Bogart to deliver a long speech while driving a car to explain it all properly.
The setting has a lot of technology in it (in short, the independent Scotland of the future has a lot of mobile phones in it that do most of what we use computers for, data analysis is a big thing and taxis that are driven by remote control from call centres) but the motives are ancient. They’re just a lot bigger than they first seem.
It’s enormously enjoyable, although it was a bit strange to jump straight from one future Edinburgh to another without any reality in between. God knows how people who read more science fiction than I do manage it.
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