REVIEW: WORLD OF TROUBLE (BOOK 3 OF THE LAST POLICEMAN TRILOGY)

 

"...But on the core fact there is one consensus: the asteroid 2011GV₁, known as Maia, measuring six and a half kilometers in diameter and traveling at a speed of between thirty-five thousand and forty thousand miles per hour, will make landfall in Indonesia at an angle from horizontal of nineteen degrees. This will happen on October 3. A week from Wednesday, around lunchtime."

Detective Henry Palace returns in the third and final entry in the Last Policeman trilogy, Ben H. Winters' "existential detective series" about one man and the last few cases that fall in his lap leading to the end of days, caused by an asteroid that is on an unavoidable destructive path with the earth. In the first novel, The Last Policeman, Palace's case was his job; in the second, Countdown City, his case was a favor; and in this, the final hurrah for Henry Palace and all the other earthlings, his case is his most personal yet: his sister, Nico, has gone missing, and he's got to find her, desperate to make amends before Maia the asteroid comes along and puts an end to everything. Believing Nico to be in the company of other like-minded folks who are convinced they have found a way destroy the asteroid before it can touch down, Palace, along with his unlikely team of companions - Cortez, a man who'd attempted to kill him with a staple gun in the previous book, and Palace's rescue dog, Houdini - travel the ruined landscapes of America in an effort to find his missing sister. But, as is usually the case, there's more than just a missing sibling. There's two bloody trails leading in and out of an abandoned Ohio police station. There's the barely-alive young girl with the slit throat Palace found in the woods. And there's the missing scientist who may or may not be with this end-of-the-world group of would-be heroes insistent they know how to avert the apocalypse.

World of Trouble is a solid finale for a solid series. The world has continued to regress since the last book, and different factions of people are acting in different ways. Some have taken to the streets in groups of vigilantes to take over stores filled with potential rations; others hide in their homes behind drawn shades, clutching shotguns and nervously peering out windows. Two particular well-meaning teens let all the animals out of the zoo to prevent them from starving to death in captivity, and one of them being immediately cornered by a tiger. These details and the many more flesh out this pre-apocalyptic world and turn it into something both surreal but also entirely believable.

For his swan song, Winters has embraced an almost-The Road type device for his tale, which puts Hank Palace on a rather innocuous task (finding a sledgehammer to bust through a suspicious and newly-installed hatch in a police station parking garage floor), but during which Palace, instead, crosses paths with several different characters, all of whom are reacting to the end of times in very different ways. In prior Last Policeman novels, the characters with whom Palace interacted were all part of the larger mystery - the "point" of the respective novel. But now, instead, there is less of a focus on unraveling a mystery than there is immersing in the drama of this environment. The mystery is still front, center, and fully accounted for, but Winters is instead weaving human experience in and out of Palace's mystery. Each character provides a missing piece of the puzzle, sure, but they're also there to provide something else: humanity.

World of Trouble's ending is bittersweet, and obviously while I won't reveal if the world comes to an end, or if Nico's band of anti-asteroid misfits manage to come through and destroy the means in which the world will end, there's still an ending here:

Hank Palace has solved his last mystery.

Buy it.

REVIEW: ANNA

An interesting future promises a specialized group of individuals called "memory detectives" who possess the strange ability to enter memories of their subjects. Much like psychics, these detectives, hailing from a company called Mindscape, are used in investigations on behalf of law enforcement to search memories of the repressed or the suspect to determine absolute truth. 

John Washington (Mark Strong, Zero Dark Thirty) plays one of these detectives, whose memory-entering abilities are high-watermark. Working under the gentle persuasion of his mentor, Sebastian (Brian Cox, Manhunter), John is tasked with investigating a teenage girl named Anna (Taissa Farmiga, that "American Horror Story" nonsense), who has opted to stop eating following a traumatic event, to determine if the girl is a genuine victim...or a sociopath with a penchant for mind games. 

Soon after meeting her and entering her memories for the first time, which include her witness to a pair of dysfunctional parents immersing in alcoholism, abuse, and betrayal, John gets sucked into a mystery involving a nasty accident at Anna's house - her father is convinced Anna is responsible and wants to commit her to an institution, but Anna begs John to look beyond the accusations against her and search for the real truth.

Anna has an interesting premise and is competently handled. Despite being a mishmash of "Millennium," The Cell, Inception, and the tiniest bit of Lolita, for extra hot/wrongness, it all comes off as rather fresh and unique. It's almost surreal watching Strong stand by in Anna's collection of memories and bearing witness to the events as they unfold in her mind, and then later watching him interact with characters and ask them questions that have directly to do with the memories he experienced quite second-hand.

Director Jorge Dorado shines in his first feature film and first spoken-English project, and he's collected a classy cast for the honor. Mark Strong doesn't often carry the lead role, and his turn as John makes you wonder why. He's pretty great, in this and in everything he does. Brian Cox's screen time is unfortunately limited, but when he's on screen, he does his Brian Cox thing, which is: be awesome. Realistically, though, this is Taissa Farmiga's show. Being that she's someone you're not supposed to fully trust, she does a great job of riding that line between victim and psycho.

Like many other films involving a haunted protagonist, Strong's insistence on helping Anna has less to do with his personal involvement with her (at least at first) and more to do with the tragedy that seems to have befallen someone very close to him, glimpses of which we're provided, and only fleetingly at first until the film approaches its conclusion. Yeah, the whole "saving a stranger = saving my child/wife/whomever" has been done before, but like I always say: do something a hundred times and I'm cool with it, so long as you do it well. Dorado and Strong do it quite well.

The ending will likely generate controversy among its viewers. Many will ask, "That's it?" But there's more going on than some cheap twist out of left field. It's less about "how?" and more about "why?" Both Anna and Anna ask that age-old question: What is reality? Are memories of the mind real? They are, after all, only as accurate as the mind in which they exist is stable. Are they more or less real if they exist within a sound mind versus one of a sociopath, or a victim repressing and/or manipulating them to make them more bearable? And if memory has the power to obscure the truth, then what is truth?

And, simply put, what good is it?

Anna hits video August 5.

READ: THE LAST POLICEMAN

If you were a homicide detective who got the call on a dead body, which, when investigated, had all the makings of a suicide and very little of a murder, would you investigate it, anyway? Would you ignore all the obvious makings of someone having taken their life and investigate it as if the deceased were murdered?

And, if the world was doomed to end courtesy of Maia, the asteroid, which was scheduled to hit the planet in a matter of months, would you still investigate? 

That's the big question at work in Ben H. Winter's The Last Policeman, the first in a trilogy involving Detective Henry Palace, a detective with the Concorde, NH, police department.

Falling within the genres of soft science fiction and mystery, though described as an "existential detective novel" by its author, The Last Policeman is an entertaining and enigmatic police procedural, and while these are always fun, it has the added effect of playing out against the apocalypse, which forces several of our characters to confront the big question: why bother? If the world is doomed to end in six months, why bother going to work, eating healthy, walking the dog, solving that murder? What's it all going to mean in the long-run?

The character of Detective Henry Palace easily fits the mold of what has become the typical investigator. He's hard-boiled, haunted by his past, cynical (though not to the point of indifference), and mostly, just trying to do his job that he's being paid to do: a man has apparently taken his life (not an uncommon occurrence in the months leading up to complete devastation), and Detective Palace dutifully investigates the scene. The "victim," Peter Zell, is found in the bathroom stall of a local McDonald's, his belt tied around his neck, strangled to death. Everyone around Palace seems ready to write it off as a suicide and move onto the next thing, but the scene bothers Palace too much - to the extent that he's willing to become a pain in the ass to his superiors and dismissive of the rules and conduct of a New Hampshire police officer. As is demanded by the mystery/noir genre, nothing is what it seems, and Detective Palace peels back layer by layer of what everyone has labeled a standard suicide, revealing something far more surprising beneath. 

The Last Policeman is thrilling, funny (in that sardonic kind of way), introspective, certainly existential, and haunting. The reader will root for Detective Palace from the start, because even though his task to investigate a suicide as a murder seems like a fool's errand in the face of Maia the asteroid and humanity's growing apathy, it's more comforting to believe that there is someone out there who cares enough to embark on such a quest on which most people have already given up. (Plus he's a kind of a generous tipper, throwing down thousands of dollars for his $15 breakfast.)

The Last Policeman is followed by Countdown City, and the final part, World of Touble, is a brand new release from the author; all three are available from Quirk Books (publisher of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children.)