McNihil

Created by K.W. Jeter

In the appropiately-titled Noir (1998), K.W. Jeter introduces McNIHIL, an ex-Collection Agency information cop with a fetish for 1940’s crime flicks, stuck in the same bleak, apolyptic L.A. of the future as Ridley Scott’s classic 1982 noir/sci-fi flick Blade Runner.

And why not? Jeter had already written two novels by 1998 set in that same world, that picked up where that film left off, featuring Rick Deckard.

Mind you, about thirty years have passed since the events in the Blade Runner film and books. The Pacific Rim is now the cultural and economic center of the civilized world, and Los Angeles, a glittering neon-lit, high-tech paradise attracting the lost souls and dreamers from across a shattered continent.

Yet all is not goodness and light. Under the gloss lies an evil conspiracy of murder, menace, and sexual terror. Enter McNihil, who has a particularly bleak view of things….literally. He’s had his eyes surgically altered so he sees everything through a computer overlay based on 1930s film noir. When a rising young executive is brutally murdered, McNihil is pressured to track down the victim’s missing “prowler”–a computer simulation that roams the world like an electronic ghost, gathering and storing vital information.

But, of course, this is noir. So things are never quite what they seem. Relying on advice from his dead wife (kept artifically alive so she can pay off the huge debts she left behind) and the aid of a ruthless female operative named November who seems to have an agenda of her own, McNihil soon realizes he’s being set up. He’s just not sure why…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeter, as well as having written several sequels to the Blade Runner film, has also written such acclaimed novels as Dr. Adder and The Glass Hammer.

UNDER OATH

• “Imagine a fast-moving computer game set in the black-and-white environment of a 1940s detective movie and you’ll begin to get some idea of the mixed metaphors that fill the air in K.W. Jeter’s difficult but ultimately rewarding new futuristic thriller.”
  — Amazon.com
• “Aided by a young woman called November, whose fingertips are alive with lethal magnetic currents, McNihil brings his–and Jeter’s–unique noir vision to bear on a world that for all its weirdness is the ultimately believable extension of our present-day nightmares.”
  — Dick Adler
• ““Jeter is an exhilarating writer who always seems to have another rabbit to pull out of his hat… (He) accomplishes his goal of updating the genre, and he does so with commendable energy and imagination.”
  — Gerald Jonas (The New York Times Book Review)

NOVELS

• Noir (1998) | Buy this book

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.