The real-town murders

You’ll take a Shine to it

In a factory where no human is ever allowed to enter and all the work is done by robots, a body is discovered in the boot of a newly built car. How did it get there? So begins Adam Roberts’s near-future SF take on the locked-room mystery.

It’s a case that lands at the gumshoes of PI Alma, who moves through a hyper-connected world where many people have opted to live out their lives as far as possible in the Shine, an addictive, immersive successor to today’s digital realms. While the Shine might be a garden of delights when you’re there, the problem, if that’s the right word, is that your body lives on out in reality.

And reality in Home Counties England is getting a little threadbare now that people are in the Shine. With so many otherwise distracted, the country is in a state of slow but steady decay, kept going by AIs.

Except Alma can’t afford the endless distractions of the Shine. Her partner has been infected by malware, and only Alma can keep her alive, by treating her every four hours and four minutes, with the two linked in a way neither fully understands. Which means that when the car factory case lands Alma in trouble with shadowy elements of the authorities, she hasn’t got the option to go on the run.

If this sounds Hitchcockian, that’s no coincidence. Even the cover here stylistically references the movie posters of Saul Bass, while the text within riffs on the way Hitchcock might have handled such a chase-narrative whodunnit, right down to a cameo by a mysterious “fat man”.

At times, it all threatens to tip over from self-consciously clever to clever-clever (puns abound), but ultimately, The Real-Town Murders provides the kind of elegantly playful fun at which Roberts, almost routinely it seems, excels. Jonathan Wright