This book is marked as fiction/thriller. But it is actually a science fiction/detective story. It is a fairly dense read. The story follows John Dominic Blaxton, who is an obsessive, dealing (or not) with the loss of his wife.

Pittsburgh has been destroyed in a terrorist nuclear attack and Blaxton’s wife was killed in the blast. A ‘matrix’ like archive, built from camera footage, security cameras and blogs has been created to honour the memory of Pittsburgh and the victims, as well as to help the survivors of the attack. Blaxton finds the corpse of a dead woman in the archive nd becomes obsessed with solving her murder. The trail leads him to realise that there are a number of similar murders and that the serial killer has not yet been caught and is still alive in the ‘real world’.

This is an excellent combination of crime and sci-fi. It is at time quite graphic and not for the squeamish. The science fiction element is not too far fetched, and seems fairly plausible, from how the internet and reality TV is developing today. The sense of loss and melancholy is very strongly conveyed. One can feel the pain of the broken people that have to deal with the aftermath of the Pittsburgh attack. The book has a very strong sense of place, and made the reader feel that Pittsburgh is a place that would be missed by people that know it well. It makes me want to visit there myself.