Water City Trilogy

Hawai'i author Chris McKinney's first entry in a brilliant new sci-fi noir trilogy explores the sordid past of a murdered scientist, deified in death, through the eyes of a man who once committed unspeakable crimes for her. Year 2142: Earth is thirty years past a near-collision with the asteroid Sessho-seki. Akira Kimura, the scientist responsible for eliminating the threat, has reached heights of celebrity approaching deification. But now, Akira feels her safety is under threat, so after years without contact, she reaches out to her former head of security, who has since become a police detective. When he arrives at her deep-sea home and finds Akira methodically dismembered, this detective willrisk everything-his career, his family, even his own life-and delve back into his shared past with Akira to find her killer. With a rich, cinematic voice and burning cynicism, Midnight, Water City is both a thrilling neo-noir procedural and a stunning exploration of research, class, climate change, the cult of personality, and the dark sacrifices we are willing to make in the name of progress.

The sequel to Midnight, Water City explores technology, class, climate change, and the lengths people will go to protect those they love. Year 2150: Eight years after the murder of Akira Kimura, Water City's renowned scientist and anointed "God," the nameless antihero who tracked down Akira's killer is no longer a detective, but a stay-at-home dad. While his wife climbs the corporate ladder of the city's police department, he raises his now nine-year-old daughter and occasionally takes the odd job as a bounty hunter. His domestic bliss is threatened when Ascalon's Scar-the mark left by Akira's destruction of Sessho-seki, the asteroid that nearly wiped out life on Earth-vanishes from the sky and a familiar face thought dead returns from the ocean depths to exact revenge on humanity. On a journey to the moon and back, Water City's antihero will risk everything, including his family, to save the last of the human race-even if it means unraveling the dark conspiracy at the heart of their world.

Faith, technology, power, and parenthood clash in the last installment of the sci-fi noir Water City trilogy. Philip K. Dick meets The Last of Us. Year 2160: Ten years after the cataclysmic events of Eventide, Water City, where 99.7 percent of the human population was obliterated by Akira Kimura, Water City's renowned scientist and Earth's once-savior. Our nameless antihero, a synesthete and former detective, and his daughter, Ascalon, navigate through a post-apocalyptic landscape populated by barbaric Zeroes-the permanent residents of the continent's biggest landfill, The Great Leachate-who cling to the ways of the old world. They live in opposition to Akira's godlike domination of the planet-she has taken control of the .03 percent of the population that viewed her as a God and converted them into her Gardeners, human "zonbies" who plod along to build her vision of a new world. What that world exactly entails, Ascalon is not entirely sure, but intends to find out. Now eighteen, she, a synesthete herself, takes over this story while her father succumbs to grief and decades of Akira's manipulation. Tasked with the impossible, Ascalon must find a way to free what's left of the human race.