Countdown City
Review
Countdown City, by , is the second novel in the The Last Policeman series. In it, Detective Palace searches for a missing person as the world continues to deteriorate.
Bret has run away from his wife Martha on a crusade to stop atrocities the US government is committing against refugees. Detective Palace pursues and finds him, only for Bret to be murdered by a man in love with Martha who doesn’t want Bret to return. When Palace gets back to Concord, he discovers Martha has disappeared as well. This mystery is weaker than in The Last Policeman, and the resolution—that Martha has run away with her father—is a letdown. I expected something cleverer, and it felt disappointingly simple.
The Nico-saves-the-world storyline continues, with her appearing in a helicopter, a literal machina, to rescue Palace after he and Bret are shot. At this point in the story, there isn’t even running water or electricity, so a helicopter seems fantastical. It makes me even more concerned that Nico and her group are actually going to save the world, which would undermine the feeling of hopelessness these books have carefully built.
One thing I liked about the book is that we get to see more of the world and explore how far it has fallen since The Last Policeman. The Coast Guard is machine-gunning children on refugee ships, the police are barely more than a gang, and power and water have been cut off, leading former neighbors to kill each other over supplies. I also loved the snippets about the Mayfair Commission, where Congress was pointlessly hauling former NASA directors in for questioning about how they could have missed the asteroid. Even with the world ending, the bureaucracy continues.
However, the flashbacks, my favorite parts of the first book, are mostly gone. We see the world as it is but lose out on learning how it got to be that way.
Overall, it’s an OK book that relies on its quick pacing. I hope my worst fears of the world being miraculously saved and the tension being ruined don’t come to pass in World of Trouble, which I’m reading next.