The gripping new novel from the #1 Sunday Times bestselling author, shortlisted for the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction
Faced with a coming apocalypse, a woman must reckon with her past to solve a series of sudden and inexplicable deaths in a searing sci-fi thriller from the Compton Crook Award–winning author of The Space Between Worlds.
Scales is the best at what she does: She is an enforcer who keeps the peace in Ashtown, a rough, climate-ravaged desert town. But that fragile peace is fractured when a woman is mangled and killed within Ash’s borders, right in front of Scales’s eyes. Even more incomprehensible is that there was seemingly no murderer.
When more mutilated bodies start to turn up, both in Ashtown and in the wealthier, walled-off Wiley City, Scales is tasked with finding the cause—and putting an end to it. She teams up with a frustratingly by-the-books partner and a brusque-but-brilliant scientist in order to uncover the truth, delving into both worlds to track down the invisible killer. But what they find points to something bigger and more corrupt than they could’ve ever foreseen—and it could spell doom for the entire world.
Staff Choice: Sophie
I really enjoyed Johnson's The Space Between Worlds, and this follow-up is just as good; a different, more focused, raging beast of a book.
The good news is that you don't need to have read the first one to make any sense of this sequel. The story is mostly set in Ashtown, full of outcasts whose rough lives have formed a patchwork community living in prickly peace in a harsh environment. Not too far away is Wiley City, a walled enclave, climate-controlled, money-rich, entitled. (Subtle this book is not.) When both communities are threatened by unexplained deaths, they must find ways to protect themselves, but how to do that with so many walls, physical and emotional, between them?
I really liked how Johnson resolved this conflict, and I also really enjoyed her rough-and-tumble characters and setting.