What would you do if the world was ending and you knew the date?
That’s the problem facing detective Henry “Hank” Palace in this crime/disaster novel.
The asteroid heading for Earth is 6.5 kilometers wide and the date of their meeting has been determined to be October 3rd. It’s now the middle of April and the winter is hanging around a bit late. Ever since the finding of Maia, the common name for the asteroid, the world was going to hell fast. The government was trying to hold things together with price controls to avoid gouging.
Hank got his promotion from patrol to detective just a couple of months back. Three early retirements, one who’d just disappeared, and one who took medical leave and never returned had left them short handed.
Hank has a body that appears, at first glance, to be just another of the dozen suicides a week since the date of Maia’s hit had been announced. But it looked suspicious to the young detective. The man had been found hanged in a bathroom at a MacDonald’s. The fellow’s cell phone was missing and his shabbily dressed body belied the expensive leather belt he’d been hanged with. There was still a cheap looking belt around his waist.
Hos fellow detectives didn’t care. One calls Hank’s efforts “attempted murder, attempting to turn a suicide into a murder.”
Hank keeps plowing along. Not easy these days. Cell reception was spotty with too many towers failing, being stripped of parts, and no one to fix them. the internet was nearly gone as well. Cars had pretty much been abandoned as Opec and Canada stopped shipping oil out as soon as they knew the end was coming. America’s oil reserves were quickly depleted. Hank only had the police Impala because they had tanks of gas and few cars to use them.
He realizes he might be getting somewhere when his Impala slides into a tree on the ice and he finds that all four tire chains had managed to come unlatched at the same time. Then a woman connected to the dead man is murdered after she’d begun to get close to Hank.
Liked this one. My only problem with it was that it would seem to me that money would quickly become useless in such a scenario and people seemed to be still using it regularly. But other than that… It’s the first of a trilogy and can be ordered HERE.
A promising scenario. I see there is a comedy movie coming out based on this premise, an asteroid going to hit the earth.
great post