... what he was saying is, at this point if it didn’t hit—if there was some last-minute thing, you know, some crazy scenario, like they can blow it up after all, or deflect it, or the religious people pray it out of the sky—...maybe that would be worse... [p. 303]
Possibly because I read all three novels in this trilogy in quick succession over a period of about 48 hours, this middle volume made less impact on me than the other two.
The end of the world is imminent: 77 days to go until a 6km asteroid plummets into the Indonesian archipelago. Society is disintegrating, and the east coast of the continental US is patrolled by coastguard cutters intercepting (and firing on) catastrophe immigrants from closer to the impact zone. Detective Hank Palace has effectively been made redundant, but he is still a policeman at heart, and when his childhood babysitter approaches him to ask if he can help her find her missing husband, he launches his own investigation. Despite the lack of electricity, internet, landline or mobile phone connectivity -- and the impossibility of any practical resolution to the case, or to anything else -- Hank sets out to find ex-police trooper Brett Cavatone.
His investigations take him to the former University of New Hampshire, now a Free Republic after a student uprising. Hank's only chance of entry is via his sister Nico, who's involved with a group of conspiracy theorists who believe the asteroid is a government coverup 'like the moon landing or the Kennedy assassination' and / or that they have the tools and contacts to avert disaster. And it does seem that Nico's friends are suspiciously well-equipped and well-connected for a bunch of random weirdos.
Hank does solve the case, for values of 'solve' including 'work out what happened and why'. It doesn't help. There's a distinct sense by the end of the novel that he's beginning to fall apart: that the threat of hope is actually more terrible to him than the certainty of catastrophe. And now that I reflect on Countdown City, I think that theme -- hope as a threat, a danger, an incentive to risk worse than annihilation -- is there throughout the novel, in several different ways: the Bucket List departures, the wife wanting her husband to come home, the students believing there's a way through.
Onward to the final volume ...
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