Necropolis

Michael Dempsey

Average Rating 8/10 (1 Review)

In a world where death is a thing of the past, how far would you go to solve your own murder?

NYPD detective Paul Donner and his wife Elise were killed in a hold-up gone wrong. Fifty years later, Donner is back: revived courtesy of the Shift. Supposedly the unintended side-effect of a botched biological terrorist attack and carried by a ubiquitous retrovirus, the Shift jump-starts dead DNA and throws the life cycle into reverse, so reborns like Donner must cope with the fact that they are not only slowly youthing toward a new childhood, but have become New York's most hated minority.

With New York quarantined beneath a geodesic blister, government and basic services have been outsourced by a private security corporation named Surazal. Reborns and infected norms alike struggle in a counterclockwise world, where everybody gets younger, you can see Elvis every night at Radio City Music Hall, and nobody has any hope of ever seeing the outside world.

Lost in a sea of nostalgia, NYC becomes an inwardly focused schizophrenic culture of alienation and loss. In this backwards-looking culture where only some of the dead have returned, Donner is haunted by revivers guilt, and becomes obsessed with finding out who killed him and his non-returning wife. Little does he know, strange forces have already begun tracking him. Donner isn't the only one obsessed with the past.

Review by Paul Lappen (310115) Rating (8/10)

Review by Paul Lappen
Rating 8/10
This novel is about a man who wakes up in a strange, neo-futuristic world, after his murder.

Paul Donner is an NYPD detective who is out for the evening with his wife. They walk in on a bodega robbery, and are killed. He wakes up, forty years later, due to something called the Shift. Said to be the side effect of a retroviral attack, it re-animates the DNA of dead people, causing them to come to life. No, they don't turn into zombies, but they do age younger (an adult becomes a teenager, who becomes a child, then an infant, and ends as a hunk of protoplasm). Such reborn people, or "reebs", are considered third-class citizens, so Donner has to investigate his murder on his own.

A protective blister, or dome, is being built over New York City to keep the Shift 'virus' (for lack of a better term) from infecting the rest of America. Manhattan has reverted to the 1930's, the time of Dashiell Hammett and the Studebaker. Harlem has gone back to the time of the Harlem Renaissance, and Greenwich Village is now in the 1960's hippie era. As Donner looks into his murder, he discovers some interesting things, like the person accused of killing him was intentionally released, without being charged. The conspiracy gets bigger and bigger, with Donner and his wife at the centre. It involves the existence of an actual immortality serum, and a plan to kill millions of people in a very public, and gruesome, way, to solidify social control over the Big Apple.

This book works on a number of levels. It works really well as a regular detective story. It also works for those who liked the film Blade Runner. It's well done from start to finish, and the twists and turns will keep the reader guessing. Here is a first-rate piece of writing.
Paul Lappen (31st January 2015)