Sleeper Beach (SF) - Nick Harkaway ****

After the success of Titanium Noir, it was almost inevitable that Nick Harkaway would give us another novel featuring his future noir detective Cal Sounder - and in many ways this doesn't disappoint. The action takes place at a faded beach resort with a weird (and not entirely explained) phenomenon that gives the book its title - hundreds of people are lying on plastic beds on the (not very pleasant sounding) volcanic beach, effectively having totally given up on life.

Sounder is there at the request of a Titan who has gone through the medical procedure that he has had once - this extends life but also makes the Titan bigger each time, and arguably less human. He is hired to look into the death of a young woman with a mysterious past who was found dead on the beach.

As he digs deeper, Sounder is both looking into the dominant (Titan-led) industry of the area and the revolutionary socialist background that the dead woman seems linked to. There's some nice detective work, and a few dramatic action scenes. As was the case with Titanium Noir, one of the fight scenes is both very dramatic and distinctly unnerving.

Overall it was a satisfying read, but I didn't like it as much as the first novel. In part it was because there was no introduction to the context - it's a couple of years since I read the previous book, and I couldn't remember how things got to the way they were. More so, when I read Titanium Noir, I pointed out how much more I enjoyed it than Harkaway's Gnomon, because that was so ponderous and filled with unnecessary detail. Sleeper Beach has lost some of the pared-down elegance of its predecessor. There's rather too much introspection on the nature of being a Titan versus a 'baseline' human. Also there was less of the gumshoe noir feel I so enjoyed in the first book - Sounder still speaks like a noir detective, but had lost some of the grittiness in his life.

That all sounds a bit negative, but I'd still recommend this book over many of the SF novels you will see recommended in the press by those who don't really understand the genre.

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