Exploded View

By Sam McPheeters

It’s 2050, and LAPD Detective Terri Pastuzka has drawn the short straw with her first assignment of the new decade. Someone has executed one of the city’s countless immigrants, and no one (besides the usual besieged advocacy groups) seems to much care. Even Terri herself is already looking ahead to her next case before an unexpected development reveals there’s far more to this corpse than meets the eye.

And a lot already meets the eye. In a city immersed in augmented reality, the LAPD have their own superior network of high-tech eyewearPanOpts, the ultimate panopticonallowing Terri instant access to files and suspects and literal insertion into the crime scene using security footage captured from every angle the day the murder occurred. What started as a single homicide turns into a string of unsolved murders that tie together in frightening ways, leading Terri down a rabbit hole through Los Angeles’s conflicting realitiesaugmented and virtual, fantastically rumored and harrowingly truetowards an impossible conclusion.

Exploded View is the story of a city frozen in crisis, haunted by hardship and overwhelmed by refugees, where technology gives everyday citizens the power to digitally reshape news in real time, and where hard video evidence is impotent against the sheer, unrelenting power of belief. After all, when anyone can forge their own version of the truth, what use is any other reality?

Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talos
• Release date: Oct 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9781940456652

Reviews for Exploded View

[mistermelon · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book was... okay. Like many people have said, the speculated future technology is very cool, and very believable. The story is a little convoluted, and it seemed like in places the author was trying to avoid obvious exposition in explaining the technology aspect, so he just dropped it in non-chalantly... But when the technology is as immersive as it is in this book, it can really confuse and make you have to go back and re-read to try to figure out what is really going on. The story was made more confusing by this, I think. To be honest, I stopped trying so hard to figure the exact plot line from about forty to seventy percent through the book. I figured, correctly, that the book would help sum it all up toward the end. The story itself was so-so. If you think you would enjoy a hard futuristic sci-fi book mashup with a detective story with conspiracy aspects, you would probably enjoy this one. **I received a free copy of this book in exchange for this unbiased review.**