Forager (Forager, #1)

by

Peter R. Stone 

A brilliant Australia-set post-apocalyptic tale for YA! 

World War III decimated Earth and society; the surviving members of the human race clustered together in settlements on the Australian continent in the former state of Victoria. Eighteen-year-old Ethan Jones has grown up in one of these city-settlements, Newhome, on the outskirts of what is left of Melbourne. He leads a successful team of 5 friends that forage for metals and other useful items amongst its ruins. Ethan, however, has a secret. Ethan is a mutant with enhanced hearing and echolocation abilities that would earn him a death sentence if the powers-that-be found out. 

The success of this team (far outstripping that of the other forager teams) attracts the attention of the “Custodians”: the militaristic overseers of the city and the guardians of the status quo. Under the pretext of protecting Ethan’s team from the horrific marauders known as the “Skels” that haunt the Melbourne ruins, a team of Custodians accompany them out of the city for a day of foraging. 

While working, the two teams must come to the rescue of a trading party from the distant city-settlement of Hamamachi that the Skels have attacked. The party’s only survivors are Counsillor Okada and his young female translator, Nanako. For Ethan, life as he knows it is fixing to change forever - again. 

The author has given us a fully developed, post-apocalyptic world and populated it with great characters. The plot is imaginative, and I was immediately absorbed in the story. The society of Newhome, highly structured with rigid and unforgiving laws and traditions, sets the stage for the variety of characters and their hopeless lives (although the ambitious can aspire to entry into the privileged and mysterious part of the city known as “North Gate.”) 

The mix of actually existing items like the Custodians’ Bushmaster vehicles and Austeyr assault rifles add a touch of our present to Ethan’s reality, and I found that fun. I also liked that the characters used actual Melbourne streets and place names on the foraging trips. I imagine that if the reader actually lived in Melbourne, that would be pretty cool. 

The action was tense and tight and held a number of twists that I never saw coming. As I read, I did not want to put the book down, respect the clock, and get on with what needed doing (sleep, work, etc.) in my day-to-day. I just needed to read “one more chapter.” Bravo to the author for a great start to his trilogy.

Neon Off Snow

by

Nick McCarthy

Good start to this unique Japanese detective series set in Osaka Prefecture.

Neon Off Snow is a new detective novel by Nick McCarthy that introduces readers to former Osaka Prefecture Police detective-turned-private eye Jon Nabeta. As a contracted consulting detective to the OPP, Nabeta is drawn into the murder of a fifteen-year-old yakuza princess that mimics the details of his most high-profile case from back when he was still with the police, the Osaka Kid Killer. With the lawyers of the convicted killer, the OPP’s former police commissioner, out to prove this new murder exonerates their client, Nabeta and his colleagues scramble to find the copycat killer and avert a war among the local yakuza families. 

Jon Nabeta is not your ordinary detective. The product of two half-American, half-Japanese parents, he looks a little different from his coworkers, and some people have a problem with that. He compensates by being the best at what he does: solving difficult crimes. Soon after his success in solving the Osaka Kid Killer case, he left the police service to go into private practice, but the reasons are not revealed until almost the end of the novel. Somewhere north of 30, Jon has had a problem relationship-wise with commitment, but his current girlfriend, Rian, has him rethinking his future life path. 

The plot follows Jon as he works the few clues discovered with the victim. There is so little to go on, Jon dives into his vast pool of contacts, informants, and information brokers for even the barest whisper of why the daughter of the powerful yakuza boss, Mamoru Usei, was murdered. The meetings with these shadowy, sometimes dangerous, underground figures yield meager suggestions for follow-up, and each scene is a perfectly developed, self-contained gem fraught with tension and atmosphere. The story is complex, with events from the past continuing to play a role in the present. 

I immensely enjoyed the close-up view of Japanese law enforcement processes, structure, and attitudes, and the plot depended quite a bit on lax protocol in evidence handling, non-existent building security, and lack of communication among investigative staff. There were a few continuity issues that were bothersome enough to require me to backtrack and reread previous scenes to try to make sense of the aspects of the story (i.e., the murder victim is naked when discovered but clothed when the body gets to the morgue.) Also, a pet peeve for me is that Nabeta is described multiple times as an unnaturally skilled deductive thinker/detective, yet he fails to connect pieces of evidence he wrongly removes from crime scenes until much later. Still, he is an engaging character, a dogged, persistent investigator with an amazing array of useful contacts and interesting informants. 

With its unique Osaka setting, insider’s/semi-official police point of view, and cinematic interview scenes and action sequences, I recommend NEON OFF SNOW to readers of traditional mysteries and police procedurals. 

I voluntarily reviewed this after receiving an Advanced Review Copy from Reedsy Discovery.