Jonathan Moore’s latest thriller is a nastily ingenious dystopian noir set in a future San Francisco where homicide detective Ross Carver is about to have a very bad life.
It all starts when Carver and his partner investigate a crime scene where the dead victim has met a mysteriously gruesome end, but before they can identify the man a half-dozen biohazard-suited FBI agents converge and force them into a decontamination trailer. When Carver wakes up several days later in his own bed to find his gorgeous neighbour (who he barely knows) reading aloud to him, and with no memory of how he got here or what has happened since the incident with the corpse and the biohazard-team, it’s the start of a descent into a conspiracy that Carver is somehow inadvertently at the centre of. He desperately needs to start piecing his missed-time together, because the story his neighbour tells him makes absolutely no sense at all, but there is no-one Carver can trust, including the people he works with…
The Night Market is apparently very loosely connected to Moore’s previous novels The Poison Artist and The Dark Room, completing what – in his acknowledgements at the book of the book – the author calls “a three-panel painting of San Francisco”. Not having read any of Moore’s previous work (although Stephen King, James Patterson and Lee Child all speak very highly of him on the back cover) it’s hard to say whether you’d get more out of this latest novel if you were already familiar with what came before. Personally, I had no problem with the first few chapters because the set-up to The Night Market has a creepy Blade Runner-meets-Seven vibe that swept me along quite happily and even managed to make my skin crawl a couple of times, but then Moore loses his way and gets a bit hardboiled for his own good. There are some interesting ideas in here – the relationship between Carver and his femme fatale-ish neighbour Mia is suitably Chandleresque (next to Carver, she’s the best-realised character in the whole story) and the overarching message about how easily it is to manipulate and break down the free will of a population (not to mention how far people will go to protect their secrets) resonates eerily when you consider what is going on in our world right now. But Moore doesn’t feel entirely committed to his futuristic setting and the collision of genres – from mystery and sci-fi to romance, police procedural and conspiracy thriller – might keep some readers entertained but too often feels as if he’s just trying to keep the story interesting so that he can keep writing it without falling asleep. The ending is good but the central third of the book feels clunky and some of the writing – especially the short, sharp tough guy dialogue – is pure cliché.
As Night Market’s go, I’d personally suggest waiting until daylight and looking elsewhere.
THE NIGHT MARKET / AUTHOR: JONATHAN MOORE / PUBLISHER: ORION / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
