Paranoia, consumerism run amok

Jonathan Moore sets his new thriller in the near future, when San Francisco has become a hellhole of rampant street crime and consumerism run amok. For the populace, life is an endless round of compulsive and needless purchases, and the desperately covetous feed their habit by stealing. What’s all the rage this week will be passe next week, replaced by a frenzy for something equally gaudy.

Almost any service you can think of has been privatized or commercialized. Among the few civic entities left untouched is the police force. Or so it seems.

Walking these meaner-thanever streets is Ross Carver, a veteran police inspector who does his work skillfully and conscientiously. One night, Carver answers a summons from his partner, Jenner, by reporting to a mansion near Coit Tower; there, Carver is warned, he will find a dead man who “looks like he got cooked.” Through Carver’s eyes we catch a more vivid glimpse of the victim: “He looked like gray moss.”

Carver and Jenner are soon joined by FBI agents “dressed to weather a night on Venus” and by members of a decontamination unit, who order the partners to undergo an immediate cleansing in a truck parked outside. The process includes drinking a glass of foul-tasting liquid and taking a hit from a medic with a “jet injector inoculation gun.”

Turn the page and you find Carver lying in his own bed, being read to by a vaguely familiar woman. This turns out to be Mia, his across-the-hall neighbor, who says she watched a uniformed crew carry him inside three days earlier. Of that journey or the grisly death scene near Coit Tower, Carver remembers nothing.

The above is only the prelude to a grim and gripping tale of wellearned paranoia. One source of Carver’s burgeoning mistrust is Mia herself.

The book’s tone is Chandleresque, the conspiracy worrying Carver and Jenner expands to Pynchonean proportions, and the physical ick they encounter might have oozed out of a Cronenberg movie. But on the whole, I’ll wager, “The Night Market” and its predecessors, “The Poison Artist” and “The Dark Room,” are like nothing you’ve ever read. In his acknowledgments, Moore sums up the novels as “a three-panel painting of San Francisco.” As done, he might have added, by Hieronymus Bosch.