Near Enemy: A Spademan Novel

The dirty bomb that turned New York City into a wasteland in 2013’s Shovel Ready continues to have reverberations in this solid sequel. To escape the grittiness of reality, many of the wealthy lose themselves in the virtual world of the limnosphere. Former sanitation worker turned hit man Spademan ekes out a living in this bleak dystopia with odd jobs. One of Spademan’s targets is Jonathan Lesser, a “hopper” who is able to enter the fantasies of those suspended in the “limn” and who has made an amazing discovery: terrorists are attacking people in the limn, where killing a person is supposed to be impossible. To stop further attacks, Spademan begins an investigation that leads to a political fixer, an Egyptian radical, and a mysterious nurse. Sternbergh laces his second cyberpunk voyage with dark humor and eccentric characters, but plot nuances are hard to follow without having read the first novel. [em]Agent: David McCormick, McCormick & Williams. (Jan.) [/em]