Titanshade (2019)
Written by: Dan Stout
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Pages: 407 (Hardcover)
Publisher: DAW
Why I Chose It: Because Carter’s a disgraced human cop; because Ajax is a new-to-town Mollenkampi rookie cop; together they fight crime! I am a total sucker for that premise, as I believe I’ve mentioned before. Less flippantly, I picked this one up because it looked like a twist on the usual urban fantasy. Plus, Chris McGrath’s cover is very nice.
The Premise:
This noir fantasy thriller from a debut author introduces the gritty town of Titanshade, where danger lurks around every corner.
Carter’s a homicide cop in Titanshade, an oil boomtown where 8-tracks are state of the art, disco rules the radio, and all the best sorcerers wear designer labels. It’s also a metropolis teetering on the edge of disaster. As its oil reserves run dry, the city’s future hangs on a possible investment from the reclusive amphibians known as Squibs.
But now negotiations have been derailed by the horrific murder of a Squib diplomat. The pressure’s never been higher to make a quick arrest, even as Carter’s investigation leads him into conflict with the city’s elite. Undermined by corrupt coworkers and falsified evidence, and with a suspect list that includes power-hungry politicians, oil magnates, and mad scientists, Carter must find the killer before the investigation turns into a witch-hunt and those closest to him pay the ultimate price on the filthy streets of Titanshade.
Minor spoilers below.
Discussion: In many ways, Titanshade is a very familiar story. It takes a whole series of comfortable fantasy/SF/crime tropes and mashes them up together. Does that make this book hopelessly derivative? I don’t think so. For me, even as I nodded in recognition of each familiar element, they still managed to add up to something greater than their parts. I think Stout did a really clever job of mixing elements together in ways that probably shouldn’t have worked — the mad science of the crazy doctor, the fantasy of pure absorbable magic, and the mundanity of oil wells. Explaining this book in more detail would make it sound like a mad mash-up. A constant, “and oh yeah, there are aliens, and oh yeah, there’s necromancy, and oh yeah, there’s a captain that’s constantly riding our hero’s butt about police protocol.”
Part of the way Stout makes this work is just steadfastly refusing to explain anything. This is smart because it keeps us from saying, “okay, but wait, how does this thing work…” and instead just dumps us into a mystery with multiple offshoots and trails to follow, lots of corruption and madness, and an appealing cast of characters. The stakes are high and the clues are laid out really well. The very familiarity of the “loner detective” makes it easy to get absorbed into this weird world, because we have the detective as our blasé guide.
Is it earth? Well, there are humans and oil and disco. There are the usual bars and men carrying flasks. There are Tibetan-style sky burials and magical rituals that are reminiscent of the Aztecs (bloodletting through the tongue with knotted material). The police are pretty much any police you’ve ever watched on television, complete with the detective who only lives to get his name in the press, the irascible, exhausted captain, the higher-ups who just want the problems to go away and who cares about actual justice. There were whales.
But there are also Squibs — sentient amphibians — and Mollenkampi — a vaguely Predator-like sentient species that could be based on beetles or on reptiles. (Since there are very large beetles in this world, and since moellenkampi is a species name for a rhinoceros beetle, I’m assuming the Mollenkampi here are more insectile than reptilian. It’s never quite made clear in the book — there are scales, but there are also mandibles, and the cover art tips toward reptilian.)
The world is compressed — cities are clustered around geothermal vents. The extinct whales spit out a pure magic called Manna, which fueled much of this civilization, until manna ran scarce. Now, the cities are failing and desperately seeking new fuel sources. Many of the humans seem to be modeled on the Amish in leading “simple” lives with their giant beetle-drawn carts. There are a lot of weirdly disparate elements that Stout brings together in the end.
Stout keeps you zooming along and off-balance until the only thing you really care about is Carter solving the mystery before terrible things happen to him, the people he protects, and the entire damn city. It really shouldn’t work, but it does. Out of all the bits and bobs he hurls into these pages, the only thing that really threw me out of the pages in utter “wait, what?” was Carter’s animus against disco music — somehow in such a different world, I couldn’t see disco ever evolving.
I thought Stout did a really good and welcome job of circumventing some of the common tropes in noir. Stout teased us with my least favorite situation: the hero cop who is forced on the run after he’s set up to take the fall. Stout set it up, then said, basically, Nah, let’s not do that. The politically hungry detective who is Carter’s opposition on the force has the opportunity to arrest Carter and says (paraphrased), I don’t like being used and I’m not stupid, so he refuses to play along. It’s a refreshing zig when I expected a zag. And there are a lot of these tiny moments.
Despite the through line being mystery, I’d have to say the core tone of this book is horror. The horror begins with a terrible murder of a Squib ambassador who’s come to Titanshade to help promote the fuel changeover to wind farms. The murder is especially grim because Squib pheromones make humans … a little crazy. A little cannibalistic. The horror feel continues when the police witch who investigates the murder physically tortures her apprentice until they can make a necromantic connection with the dead. Even the bad guys have their major problems. The killer is more “tormented Winter Soldier” — manipulated, brainwashed, and physically altered — than “cool as ice” contract assassin. With all this as lead-up, perhaps it’s redundant to say that the ending is very violent. So if you’re not big on horror in your mystery, step away.
In Conclusion: I would recommend this book to those of us who like urban fantasy, who like second-world mystery, and those who like their noir with a giant, heaping dash of the weird.
This is apparently the first book in the series. Right now, I’m satisfied with this as a standalone, but I’ll probably take a look at the second one when it is released.
Gotta love the Chris McGrath cover!