In a deserted tenement in an occupied city, two dead bodies lie on a dusty floor as if they have fallen out of the air. One corpse is cut in half, the other is utterly unmarked. One is human, the other isn’t. The city of Ambergris is half ruined, rotten, its population controlled by narcotics, internment camps, and acts of terror. But its new masters want this case closed, urgently. Detective John Finch has just one week to solve it or be sent to the camps. With no ID for the victims, no clues, no leads, and precious little hope, Finch’s fate hangs in the balance.
But there is more to this case than meets the eye. Enough to put Finch in the crosshairs of every spy, rebel, informer, and traitor in town. Under the shadow of the eldrich tower the occupiers are raising above the city, Finch is about to come face-to-face with a series of mysteries that will change him and Ambergris forever. Why does one of the victims most resemble a man thought to have been dead for a hundred years? What is the murders’ connection to an attempted genocide nearly six hundred years ago? And just what is the secret purpose of the occupiers’ tower?
Jeff VanderMeer is an award-winning novelist and editor. His fiction has appeared in the Library of America’s American Fantastic Tales and in multiple anthologies. His recent books have made the year’s best books lists of Publishers Weekly, San Francisco Chronicle, and Amazon.com.
Oliver Wyman is an actor and award-winning audiobook narrator. He has won five Audie Awards from the Audio Publisher’s Association, fourteen Earphone Awards, and two Listen Up Awards from Publisher’s Weekly. He was named a 2008 Best Voice in Nonfiction & Culture by AudioFile magazine. He has appeared on stage as well as in film and television, and he is a veteran voice actor who can be heard in numerous cartoons and video games. He is one of the founders of New York City’s Collective Unconscious theater, and his performances include the award-winning “reality play” Charlie Victor Romeo and A. R. McElhinney’s cult classic film A Chronicle of Corpses.