Philip Marlowe meets Redwall in this superior adult noir tale, where all the characters are animals, fighting for survival in the city underneath the humans.
Down these mean streets a beast must walk...
Meet Skotch. Racoon, P.I.-Yours for a few buttons as long as the job isn't too illegal, whatever that means.
A mouse has gone missing. Normally this wouldn't raise any hackles, nor any alarms, but this mouse has something that everyone seems to want, though nobody appears particularly eager to say what that something is.
The fee is good-perhaps too good. Certainly not something Skotch can easily turn down.
If only Skotch can work out where the mouse is hiding, what he's hiding, and why his secrets are upsetting a lot of animals caught up in the Green City wars.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied. Adrian Tchaikovsky is a British science-fiction and fantasy writer known for a wide-variety of work including the Children of Time, Final Architecture, Dogs of War, Tyrant Philosophers and Shadows of the Apt series, as well as standalone books such as Elder Race, Doors of Eden, Spiderlight and many others. Children of Time and its series has won the Arthur C Clarke and BSFA awards, and his other works have won the British Fantasy, British Science Fiction and Sidewise Awards.
Praise for Adrian Tchaikovsky
"A surprisingly thoughtful and compelling story...Readers who love a good post-apocalyptic hell ride, AI-centered adventures, and robot/human companion stories, such as A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers, will appreciate." -Library Journal, starred review on Service Model
"With humor, heart, and hope balancing out the decay, this glimpse of the future is sure to win fans." -Publishers Weekly on Service Model
"Picking up an Adrian Tchaikovsky book is proof you love your brain and want it to be happy." -John Scalzi
"There's an Ursula Le Guin-like grace to [Tchaikovsky's] storytelling... Ten out of 10." -The New York Times on Elder Race
"An epic tale of a land ruled by magic-or the sober record of a world colonized by science...The double vision built into the story works well." -The Wall Street Journal on Elder Race
"Rex, a two-metre-tall bioengineered dog, is one of the most achingly human characters I have ever encountered in an SF novel. A gripping dive into bioethics and artificial intelligence." -New Scientist on Dogs of War
"Children of Time is a joy from start to finish. Entertaining, smart, surprising and unexpectedly human." -Patrick Ness
