Summary: There is only 6 months before the world ends, but Detective Palace still has crimes to solve.
Mostly I picked up this book because I liked the concept. A large asteroid is coming toward earth and because of its odd orbit it was not detected until just about a year before it is scheduled to hit the earth. At the time of the book, it is six months until it hits. It has been confirmed that it is a certainty that the asteroid will hit and it will likely wipe out most of the population of the earth.
The world economy is in shambles (reminiscent of Station Eleven), but there is a longer preparation time. What would you do if you had six months to life, and so did everyone else?
Hank Palace is a young detective. Only 25, but he is sure that his recent suicide case (his ninth in 3 months) is not actually a suicide. But he not only has to fight for the freedom to solve it, he has to try to solve it in the context of a system that is breaking down.
This is a fairly straight forward detective novel. The end was clear long before it was clearly revealed. But it was enjoyable. And there are lots of hints in Amazon and Goodreads reviews that the later books make sense of some of the leaps that are in this book.
I picked this up on sale and so I probably won’t go out of my way to get the rest of the trilogy, but I probably will pick them up later. The setting is great, the execution is decent.
The Last Policeman by Ben H Winters Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook, Scribd ebook