As a huge crime reader who's also, to put it lightly, not a fan of the police, I still end up reading a lot of books that center police investigations. To a certain degree, it's because all books are fantasies to a degree, and detective novels present a police force that's generally honest, competent, and not aimed solely at supporting state power (and where corrupt cops are swiftly caught and punished). I cut my teeth on these as far back as Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels, and find I'm more okay with this in literature than when watching TV (where I find most post-Columbo cop shows pretty unbearable).

Which is all to say that this is still a hell of a unique setting for a cop novel. It's essentially pre-apocalypse. As the book begins (in the year 2012, which is also when it was published¹), an asteroid (called Maia) is on a collision course with earth, and it's big enough to cause an extinction event. Needless to say, society's breaking down, as corporations have gone bankrupt (McDonalds) or devolved (Panera's owners "have undergone a meaningful spiritual experience and restaffed most of the restaurants with coreligionists, so it’s not worth going in there unless you want to hear the Good News"), while the country's descended into a mix of (more) fascism and anarchy. Every company's been hit my shortages as folks decide to go "bucket list" and quit their jobs for one last adventure, so critical infrastructure like cell towers are failing. Police, teachers, firefighters, etc are all stretched super thin for the same reason.

Hank Palace is a member of the force in Concord, NH, and gets called in to investigate a hanging that appears to be suicide. Of course it's not, and his investigation of that case, often stymied by disinterested colleagues (the DA at one point tells Palace that the crime is attempted murder because "it’s a suicide, but you’re attempting to make it a murder."), dovetails with his investigation (off-book) into the disappearance of his brother-in-law, a man his sister married on a whim after the news about Maia hit.

The best way to describe the novel would have to be "bleak." Solving the crime won't change anything in the world. At best, he can get answers (with no assurances of justice), but nothing more. In many ways, the investigation's an opportunity to examine the ways society can break down (from the top down and bottom up), but without the hope that even more apocalyptic settings like The Hunger Games or V for Vendetta offering of things getting better.

If you have any sense of my taste, you can probably figure that I loved this, but it's definitely not for everyone. It's an existential crime novel with a looming apocalypse, and it's not the Douglas Adams kind of thing where we, the readers, get to leave the destroyed world behind and laugh.

There are two sequels (leading right up to Maia's impact), but while I read and enjoyed those when they came out, I only re-read the first book this time.