Sleeper Beach - Outside of a Dog

English language

ISBN:: 978-1-4721-5889-5

On the shore of a rundown holiday town, a young woman washes up dead. Martha Erskine, the matriarch of a local dynasty, suspects a member of her own family might be involved in the murder, and calls in Cal to investigate.

Cal Sounder is a detective first and a Titan second, but it's not easy to make that work. It's hard to be an ordinary guy when you're fundamentally not ordinary anymore. Cal has recently taken a dose of T7, a rare drug that is usually the preserve of the rich, making its users - called the Titans - younger and bigger each time they take it, so that as they age the bodies of the ultra-wealthy become as immense as their bank accounts.

As Cal digs into the crime, he finds this forgotten town is simmering with wage disputes, strikes, and political conflict, and no one is …

On the shore of a rundown holiday town, a young woman washes up dead. Martha Erskine, the matriarch of a local dynasty, suspects a member of her own family might be involved in the murder, and calls in Cal to investigate.

Cal Sounder is a detective first and a Titan second, but it's not easy to make that work. It's hard to be an ordinary guy when you're fundamentally not ordinary anymore. Cal has recently taken a dose of T7, a rare drug that is usually the preserve of the rich, making its users - called the Titans - younger and bigger each time they take it, so that as they age the bodies of the ultra-wealthy become as immense as their bank accounts.

As Cal digs into the crime, he finds this forgotten town is simmering with wage disputes, strikes, and political conflict, and no one is quite who they say they are - not even the victim. As Cal second-guesses everyone he meets, he is forced to confront his own identity and ask himself who he wants to be from the far side of the mirror of power, age and greed.

2 editions

Marek reviewed Sleeper Beach by Nick Harkaway (Titanium Noir, #2)

Solid, science fiction noir

4 stars

This is a solid, though perhaps not stellar follow up to Titanium Noir (2023). Cal Sounder, private detective, no longer with a foot in two worlds but uncertain of how he feels about being all-in on what might be the wrong side. A body on a beach whose complex history it will take until the final pages to understand.

Perhaps in keeping with noir-ish-ness, there is a lot left very vague. It isn't the very near future (some of the characters of hundreds of years old), but the technology level is very now+just a little. The only really breakaway technology is the rejuvenating chemical T7, which both resets your physical age to late-teens, while increasing your physical size by some significant portion. Multi-dose "Titans" become greater still. The location is vaguely both North American and European. The culture is one with a love-hate relationship to these uber-wealthy in the …

This is a solid, though perhaps not stellar follow up to Titanium Noir (2023). Cal Sounder, private detective, no longer with a foot in two worlds but uncertain of how he feels about being all-in on what might be the wrong side. A body on a beach whose complex history it will take until the final pages to understand.

Perhaps in keeping with noir-ish-ness, there is a lot left very vague. It isn't the very near future (some of the characters of hundreds of years old), but the technology level is very now+just a little. The only really breakaway technology is the rejuvenating chemical T7, which both resets your physical age to late-teens, while increasing your physical size by some significant portion. Multi-dose "Titans" become greater still. The location is vaguely both North American and European. The culture is one with a love-hate relationship to these uber-wealthy in the process of speciation.

It's steadily-paced, with good characterisation, though does have the noir tendency for just about everyone to be deeply cynical and drily witty about it the wretched state of the world.

The title refers to a strange phenomenon that rings true from the cyberpunk ancestry of the mixed-genre Harkaway is using here - people arriving like human flotsam to a beach in a quasi-catatonic state somewhere between existential dread and apathy. Suicidal without the intention, non-too-subtly wasting their days on a beach made of black glass, with no connection to the world around them.

The "sleepers" play a strange background role for the protagonist, a haunting of humanity rather than a narrative driver. I won't say too much more about them, though I did feel they were both some of the more interesting but also some of the more frustrating aspects of things as the story progresses.

There's mystery, some action, a little reflection on humanity and post-humanity. Certainly enjoyable, though not something I'll urging on people who aren't already curious.