Necropolis

Necropolis, Michael Dempsey, Night Shade Books, 2011

This novel is about a man who wakes up in a strange, neo-futuristic world, after his murder.

Paul Donner is an NYPD detective who is out for the evening with his wife. They walk in on a bodega robbery, and are killed. He wakes up, forty years later, due to something called the Shift. Said to be the side effect of a retroviral attack, it re-animates the DNA of dead people, causing them to come to life. No, they don't turn into zombies, but they do age younger (an adult becomes a teenager, who becomes a child, then an infant, and ends as a hunk of protoplasm). Such reborn people, or "reebs," are considered third-class citizens, so Donner has to investigate his murder on his own.

A protective blister, or dome, is being built over New York City to keep the Shift "virus" (for lack of a better term) from infecting the rest of America. Manhattan has reverted to the 1930's, the time of Dashiell Hammett and the Studebaker. Harlem has gone back to the time of the Harlem Renaissance, and Greenwich Village is now in the 1960's hippie era. As Donner looks into his murder, he discovers some interesting things, like the person accused of killing him was intentionally released, without being charged. The conspiracy gets bigger and bigger, with Donner and his wife at the center. It involves the existence of an actual immortality serum, and a plan to kill millions of people in a very public, and gruesome, way, to solidify social control over the Big Apple.

This book works on a number of levels. It works really well as a regular detective story. It also works for those who liked the film "Blade Runner." It's well done from start to finish, and the twists and turns will keep the reader guessing. Here is a first-rate piece of writing.