The Hollywood Spiral
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2.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
From the author of Apathy and Other Small Victories, this darkly comic novel set in the near future about the race to find a missing cyber program with the power to bend reality—all before a fast-approaching comet destroys the earth.
In the near future, after the internet grinds to a halt amid a wave of cyber-attacks, a company named Zodiac steps in to replace it with an evolved, augmented-reality version called The Grid. Harrigan, a hard-drinking private detective living as off-Grid as possible, is about to be evicted from his apartment when a stranger shows up asking for his help in finding Anna, an escort who he claims he's desperately in love with. Turns out that through Harrigan's new client, Anna has come into possession of a program/entity called Mirror, Mirror, which has the capacity to merge The Grid and reality, bending both to the whims of the program's user. Soon Harrigan finds himself up against the last surviving organized crime gangs in Los Angeles, Zodiac's mercenaries, and a mysterious group called The First Church Multiverse, all of whom are hot on the trail of Mirror, Mirror—if the comet rapidly approaching Earth doesn't kill them all first.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this clever near-future hard-boiled detective tale from Neilan (Apathy and Other Small Victories), devastating multiple "online data hacks and security breaches" enabled a company, Zodiac, to take over the entire infrastructure of the internet, replacing it with the Grid. The Grid both provided greater security and ease of use, and rapidly became omnipresent, producing individual scores for people that were "combination credit rating and social metric." Harrigan, an L.A. private eye, who tries to minimize his time on the Grid, is approached by Stan Volga, who pays him much needed cash to trace a missing hooker named Anna. Volga wants the search kept off Grid. Harrigan accepts the job, only to rapidly run into an obstacle in the form of Charlie Horse, a vicious mobster who got his nickname from his habit of shooting out people's kneecaps. Charlie is also interested in Anna's whereabouts. The search gets even more fraught when Harrigan learns that Zodiac is looking for her as well. Neilan makes this dystopian and unsettling world feel frighteningly real. Fans of Jonathan Lethem's Gun, with Occasional Music will be enthralled.
Customer Reviews
Terrible
I can’t believe I finished this.