“It’s not ‘falling on our heads,’ okay? It’s not ‘coming for us.’ It just is. Do you understand?” [p. 135]
This novel, described as a science fiction mystery or an 'existential detective novel', was published in 2012: I'm not sure how I missed it at the time, or in the subsequent eight years. I'm very glad to have discovered it -- indeed, the whole trilogy -- now.
The premise is simple: the end of the world is nigh, courtesy of the asteroid known as Maia which is due to collide with the earth in six months' time. During the previous year, as the asteroid approached on its irregular orbit, economic panic has driven megacorporations such as McDonalds to bankruptcy; provoked the passing, in the US, of draconian new laws that enforce price controls, prohibit the manufacture or sale of firearms, and legalise marijuana; and caused widespread social upheaval as suicide rates rise, individuals abandon jobs and family to complete their bucket lists, and conspiracy theories explode. (Though by the time of this novel there's very little left of the media/communications infrastructure.)
Against this backdrop is Hank Palace, a young detective with the Concord Police Force, trying to do his job the best he can. He's investigating what seems to be just another suicide, and though his colleagues urge him to file it and move on, he's determined to unravel the facts of the case. The dead man was an insurance claims investigator (unsurprisingly, the bottom has dropped out of the life insurance market): it's possible that he was killed to conceal evidence of a major fraud.
Regardless, Palace seems to be the only person who actually cares about the fate of one socially-inept insurance clerk. As he points out, 'the end of the world changes everything, from a law-enforcement perspective'. Any jail sentence of over six months is effectively a life sentence; rising rates of suicide and disappearance, as well as the collapse of communications infrastructure, make it harder to investigate any criminal activity. And in the end -- no, not in the end, in six months' time -- civilisation will end anyway, with tsunamis and earthquakes, firestorms and ash-clouds and cold darkness.
There's a certain arrogance to Palace. He thinks he can somehow hold civilisation together: thinks that doing the right thing, doing the job to the best of his ability, still matters. Late in the novel a sliver of hope is offered up by his sister Nico, and it's to the author's credit that I seized on that sliver just as eagerly as the characters did.
A piquant read in a time when the world seems to be falling apart rather more gently, with a whimper not a bang. I seem to have developed a taste for apocalyptic novels, and I bought and read the second and third in the trilogy as soon as I'd finished The Last Policeman.
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