The post-apocalyptic world is all the rage these days. Between games like The Last of Us and TV shows like The Walking Dead, the varied stories of people caught in extraordinary, terrifying times have captured our attention by presenting tales of said people trying to hold on to the shreds of their humanity when there are no laws to protect them against other survivors or the monsters roaming the land, depending on the kind of world being depicted.
Ben Winters’ novel The Last Policeman, the first in a trilogy, marks a vastly different approach to this genre because it is a pre-apocalyptic novel, focusing on a world that is slowly spiraling downward towards an eventual end brought about by an asteroid collision with Earth. People either seek to fulfill all the items on their individual bucket lists, make peace with themselves or the others they’ve hurt, take up lives of crime, or sink into wells of drug- or alcohol-fueled apathy. The government has nationalized state National Guard units, who attempt to keep the peace.
Amidst all of this is Hank Palace, a recently promoted detective working out of the special investigations unit of the police department in Concord, New Hampshire. At the novel’s beginning, Palace is called to the scene of a suicide discovered in the bathroom of a local McDonald’s. He takes the investigation further than what his fellow detectives and district attorney would like, going over the scene and realizing that the details aren’t adding up to suicide, but to murder.
What follows is Palace’s journey into a case that only he believes is a murder, with the chief of his unit indulging him and everyone else not really caring. The thing that’s great about Winters’ novel is the believability of his protagonist – world-weary at a young age, trying to do an increasingly Sisyphus-like job what with the lack of motivation and the danger that increases the deeper he gets into the case.
My only qualm is that the book plateaus a little towards the middle. While the vast majority of the book makes for very good pre-apocalyptic noir, there are moments that feel more like filler rather than adding to the overall depth of the novel. In any case, fans of noir and apocalyptic scenarios won’t be disappointed in this novel. I’m eager to get into the rest of the trilogy myself after reading this first book.
Rating: 4.0/5
The Eclectic Post-Dispatch 