Eventide, Water City
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A futuristic fusion of noir, adventure, thriller, and horror, the second installment in the acclaimed Water City Trilogy explores how dystopia might be right around the next century’s corner.
Year 2150: Eight years after the murder of Akira Kimura, Water City’s renowned scientist and anointed “God,” the nameless antihero who once risked everything to find Akira’s killer is no longer a detective, but a stay-at-home dad. While his wife climbs the corporate ladder of the Water City Police Department, he raises his now nine-year-old daughter and occasionally takes the odd job as a bounty hunter.
Water City’s domestic bliss is threatened when Ascalon’s Scar—the permanent mark left by the elimination of Sessho-seki, an asteroid that nearly wiped out life on Earth—vanishes from the sky and a familiar face thought dead returns from the ocean depths to exact revenge on humanity. What follows is a wild journey, both deep below and high above a futuristic Pacific, that takes Water City’s antihero from Lucky Cat City (formerly Osaka, Japan) to the moon and back, all to stop the destruction of the last of the human race.
Hawai'i author Chris McKinney’s cinematic, immersive follow-up to Midnight, Water City explores technology, class, climate change, and the lengths desperate people will go to in order to protect the ones they love.
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3 primary booksThe Water City Trilogy
The Water City Trilogy is a 3-book series with 3 primary works first released in 2021 with contributions by Chris McKinney.
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I read the first book in this series earlier this year and really liked it, in the face of unfavorable reviews. I liked the sci-fi detective noir setting, and felt like people went into it expecting something different than what they got. It had flaws, but I really enjoyed the stream of consciousness writing style associated with our detective's thought processes, as well as the cyberpunk-esque setting he was in.
This book felt just a bit less entertaining, if only because it feels less a detective noir and more a cyberpunk thriller, which is fine I suppose, but not what I enjoyed from the first one. That's not to say this was a bad book -- I did give it four stars after all -- just that my reasons for liking the first one and this second one are different.
We're eight years off of the first book, and our still-unnamed protagonist is raising his kid after being relieved from duty while his wife retains her job on the police force. (story spoilers here) Unfortunately, Ascalon is back and still wants to get one over on her mom Akira Kimura and show how much better she is at everything, so her neural implant burrows into his kid's eye socket while she's swimming and takes her over. What follows is a lot of our protagonist thinking he's finally breaking the hold Akira and Ascalon have over him, but really he's following the path they meticulously lay out for him to the letter. Our protagonist does a lot of thinking in this one about whether he has free will, or whether he's just a puppet for either of them--or both.
There's lots of action in this one. Almost wall-to-wall action, actually. We go to space, we go underwater, we go to the old United States where people live without IEs and technology, giving the author plenty of time to flesh out this dystopian-esque cyberpunk world he's created. But you don't get much time to catch your breath or enjoy the scenery, because our protagonist is never in any of these places for very long before the next story beat yanks him away. The pace really is pretty frenetic, so if fast paced thrillers are your thing you'll probably enjoy this second book better than the first.
I thought it was just a little bit too fast for my taste, but I still did greatly enjoy the book (and that ending!). I'll be moving onto book three in 2025 sometime.