Review of Countdown City by Ben Winters (Quirk Books, 2013)

There’s only 77 days until an asteroid ploughs into Earth causing an apocalypse.  Hank Palace has lost his job as a police detective and is counting down the days to doomsday hanging out with his dog, Houdini, and chatting at a local diner.  All around them society is crumbling in advance of the impact.  To try and keep order, the US Department of Justice has invoked a police state, but regardless people have organised themselves into collectives and communes, and many have abandoned their lives in order to undertake their bucket list.  When Martha Milano, Palace’s old babysitter asks him to look for her missing husband, Palace thinks that Brett Cavatone might have fled the nest.  As he tries to track him down, he senses that Brett had another agenda.  Finding Brett, however, is no easy task given the lack of modern amenities and Palace is forced to rely on the help of his anarchist sister who still has hope that the apocalypse can be avoided.  The general consensus is that Palace should abandon his hunt and concentrate on keeping himself alive, but his sense of obligation and duty and his desire to act as a detective compel him to find Brett and bring him home to Martha.

Countdown City is the second book in the Last Policeman trilogy and picks up Hank Palace’s story a couple of months after the first.  The real strength of the series is the premise and the character of Hank Palace.  Despite the impending doom of an asteroid hitting Earth, Palace feels compelled to continue acting like a detective and serving his fellow citizens, despite having lost his job and the woman he loved.  Everyone around him might be selfishly acting out their desires or plotting how to survive the apocalypse, but Hank is determined to stay a decent, humane fellow to the end.  Having such a civil lead character enables Winters to inflect the story with a series of philosophical questions concerning social relations and how people treat each other in extreme circumstances.  He does so, however, subtly so that the story remains very much a crime novel rather than a reflective literary text.  The plot for the most part works fine, with Palace trying to track down a wayward husband who has abandoned his wife.  However, it did very much read as a bridging book to the final instalment, moving elements of the plotline and characters into place for the denouement.  As such, the reader really needs to have read the first book to fully understand what is happening and has to appreciate that they will need to read the third to experience closure given the open ending of this instalment (I’m assuming the third book will provide closure).  Overall, an entertaining read, but probably not best read as a standalone.

Tuning out

"You have a way of saying you're going to listen to something, but then when the other person is talking you're up in your head having some sort of complicated policeman dialog with yourself about something else."

The speaker is describing Hank Palace, a former cop who can't stop being a cop, in the second part of The Last Policeman trilogy, Countdown City.  If you swap the word 'policeman' to 'academic' it's a sentiment I've heard dozens, possibly hundreds, of times.  I can happily spend hours upon hours locked away in my head talking to myself!  The book, by the way, is proving to be as entertaining as the first.

Review of The Last Policeman by Ben Winters (Quirk, 2012)

Hank Palace has achieved his life’s ambition to become a police detective in the small town of Concord.  Unfortunately his promotions coincides with news that Earth is going to be hit by 6.5 kilometre wide asteroid travelling at speed.  In the months before the coming apocalypse the economy has unravelled, some people have found religion, others are making plans to try and survive, or have given up work and are living one long party.  And some are not waiting to find out if humanity will survive and are taking their own lives.  One such man, an insurance actuary, has seemingly hung himself in a McDonalds’ toilet stall.  But Palace is not convinced.  The world might be about to end in six months time, but he’s going to continue to his job regardless of the general apathy and lack of resources.  And if foul play is involved, he’s going to make sure the perpetrator witnesses the event from behind bars.

The tag-line for The Last Policeman is ‘what’s the point of solving murders if we’re all going to die soon, anyway?’  It brings an interesting twist to the story, providing an unusual framing.  Otherwise, this is a straight up-and-down police procedural where Palace uses his skills and wits to piece together and solve a mystery puzzle.  The construction of the story is well done, with Palace being misdirected or led down dead-ends, slowly working out the reason for the death.  The characterisation is a little thin especially beyond Palace, suffering I think from the first person narrative, but it’s made up for in the plot and premise.  There was also more scope to explore the nature of a pre-apocalyptic society and elaborate some philosophical musings on the meaning of life and the human condition.  However, the premise is used much more as context, rather than as foil.  That’s fine, but I felt it was a missed opportunity.  Overall, an enjoyable, well written police procedural with a nice contextual twist.