Silhouette

Christian pastor Swavely’s debut offering is a brisk SF thriller set in a near-future San Francisco and tainted by racial and religious stereotypes. After a cataclysmic earthquake, the city’s enigmatic police chief, Saul Rabin, created a high-tech security company, BASS, and transformed the failing city into a powerful city-state. One of Rabin’s protégés, Michael Ares, is devastated when his young daughter dies in an explosion aimed at fellow BASS exec Darien Anthony. He sets out to find the killer and instead uncovers a mutinous plot. The high-tech future is replete with antigravity and cool wetware augmentations, but the murder mystery is thinly plotted and somewhat predictable. (Nov.)