AVALON CITY. Human tourists come chasing myths and legends, but the feral megacity's fabled hallucinatory glamour barely masks its mean streets.
ACPD Detective Reis "Rat" Attalus is having a dark week. His partner's dead, a ruthless trafficker is building a fat pipeline for a long-forgotten lethal narcotic from the human world, and the dealer who was Rat's key to the trafficker's network has vanished. Worst of all, Rat can't let his guard down for a second—even when he's not undercover—or someone might discover his half-human parentage, kick him off the all-feral police force, and subject him to the harshest punishment the courts of the Realm have to offer.
Then he meets Leoni Minides, the cartel's money launderer, who promises to help him if Rat cuts her in on the deal. Leoni has her own enigmatic agenda—which probably includes betraying Rat—but she might be his only chance to unravel a conspiracy that runs from the down-and-dirty streets of Oldcity to the lofty mansions of the power elite. In Avalon City, sociopaths are the norm, and trust is a liability. Rat's used to playing it close to the edge, but this case might just carry him over the brink once and for all.
Mining the same character-driven pulp fiction vein as Raymond Chandler and Walter Mosley, Gibson relocates hard-boiled suspense to a fantasy/science fiction setting, evoking the atmosphere of BLADE RUNNER, NEUROMANCER, and Refn's DRIVE with a blend of slow-burn thrills and retrofuturism.
