The award-winning Scottish crime author Chris Brookmyre tweeted a one-star Amazon review he received for his new novel, Places in the Darkness, earlier this month. “This needs a ‘serious science fiction’ warning, in capital letters,” raged the reader, who’d clearly been expecting another slice of Brookmyre’s excellent tartan noir. “I feel kind of bad,” responded Brookmyre, brimming with sarcasm. “My publishers should maybe have put a space station on the cover or something.”
Brookmyre is, it’s true, better known for his crime novels, particularly those starring his doesn’t-do-things-by-the-book reporter Jack Parlabane; the recent Black Widow won him both the Theakston crime novel of the year and the McIlvanney prize. Places in the Darkness does indeed see him boldly going into the realms of science fiction, so count yourself warned – if that space station filling the front cover hadn’t already given it away. It’s set on Earth’s first space station, Ciudad de Cielo, known as CdC, or Seedee. Built 70 years ago, with 100,000 residents, it’s “as close to a city without crime as mankind has seen”. There’s never been a homicide before, but Brookmyre opens with a doozy, his new setting allowing a writer who has never been afraid of diving right into the visceral side of a crime a whole new dimension to play with.
“In zero-g, the gentle ballet of objects in motion can make anything look elegant. Not this. Glistening organs dance gently around each other in the bright expanse, like motes of dust in a shaft of sunshine,” he tells us, entirely gruesomely, before introducing his diametrically opposed detectives. First up, there’s Alice Blake, who has just arrived from Earth to shake up CdC’s security operation. Young and bright, although bad at reading people, she’s viewing everything for the first time too, and serves as our introduction to the place. Then there’s dodgy cop Nikki Freeman, a former LAPD investigator who is making a living from the shadier side of the station’s operations. “You gotta be prepared to turn a blind eye to lesser crimes… In my experience, bootlegging and payola are less of a threat to society than flaying a human being and turning the body into a real-life exploded anatomy diagram.”
As the killings escalate and panic looms, Nikki and Alice are forced to investigate together. “There’s tension in this place. You can feel it. And it’s building up to something bad, something explosive,” Alice is told by one of the many space station residents with a vested interest in her new role.
Brookmyre, who has dabbled in SF before with the novel Bedlam, gives us a fully realised world – one far enough into the future to feature intriguing technologies, such as the mesh implants that upload information into their owner’s brains. “You don’t need to read or experience new information, you simply know it, and you can’t forget what you learned or choose to switch it off at the end of the day.” But what this veteran crime writer really provides in Places in the Darkness is another corker of a murder mystery, his new setting – with which he’s clearly having a whale of a time – giving him the opportunity to wow us with an even twistier twist than usual.
• Places in the Darkness by Chris Brookmyre is published by Orbit (£18.99). To order a copy for £16.14 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846
