The Night Market

Moore (The Dark Room) sets this outstanding SF noir in a near-future San Francisco, where ocean current changes have made the rain nearly continuous, electric cars prowl the streets, and disposable LED postcard ads seduce the citizenry. When SFPD Det. Ross Carver and his partner, Cleve Jenner, answer a late-night summons to an expensive home, they find something odd: a man’s body “that looked like gray moss. Like a carpet of it spread across a rot-shrunken log.” Hazmat-suited FBI agents take over the crime scene and send the two to a portable decontamination unit. Ross awakens in his bed days later with his mysterious neighbor, the beautiful Mia Westcott, attending to him. He has no memory of that night, only the sense that something is wrong and a lingering metallic scent to guide him. Moore smoothly fills Carver’s quest for the truth with equal parts hidden menace and outright strangeness. This mystery feels like Blade Runner as if it were written by Charles De Lint or Neil Gaiman. Agent: Alice Martell, Martell Agency. (Jan.)