{"id":3834,"date":"2015-05-15T22:12:08","date_gmt":"2015-05-16T02:12:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.e357.net\/beingernest\/?p=3834"},"modified":"2015-04-14T22:16:49","modified_gmt":"2015-04-15T02:16:49","slug":"depth-by-lev-ac-rosen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/depth-by-lev-ac-rosen\/","title":{"rendered":"Depth by Lev AC Rosen"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a> Depth<\/b> by\u00a0Lev\u00a0AC\u00a0Rosen
\nReview by Ernest Lilley
\nRegan Arts. Hardcover \u00a0ISBN\/ITEM#: 1941393071
\nDate: 28 April 2015 List Price $24.95 Amazon US<\/b><\/a> \/
\nSimone Pierce is a gumshoe in galoshes in a post-climate-change New York City that isn\u2019t so much Venice as it is Atlantis just before it slips beneath the waves. The water stopped rising at the 21st floor, and the big apple is now bobbing in the Atlantic, miles from shore. Aside from that, Depth<\/strong> is a pretty straightforward clone of the Hollywood PI story. Simone is supposed to be trailing a cheating husband, but the blonde in the picture, and it’s always a blonde, doesn\u2019t look like that\u2019s what she\u2019s selling. Then our gal\u00a0 picks up another case, babysitting a guy looking for the fabled lost tunnel beneath the waves and she has to juggle her cases to keep everything afloat. Oh, you winced at the \u201cafloat\u201d bit. That\u2019s nothing compared to the nautical jargon that the author has injected for slang, skipper.<\/i><\/p>\n

As it always happens in detective stories, everybody winds up involved in the same con in one way or another, and they’re all lying to you. Either that or they\u2019re lying to themselves.<\/p>\n

Frankly, I like my noir<\/em> detectives gritty and world-weary, and you\u2019d think being a New York City PI after an apocalyptic sea-level rise would provide enough water-logging to sink a Shamus\u2019 spirits. Not so. Our gal is just a standard career detective who passed on a job on the force like her dad, who got into the PI biz the traditional way, and now she takes cases from her best gal-pal, the deputy mayor. She\u2019s got an ex-boyfriend on the force, but lipstick is thicker than water if you ask me, and Simone\u2019s only really crisis comes when she can\u2019t figure out if her best friend is her friend at all. Can gals have a bro-mance? Ironically, in today\u2019s literary market, \u201cstrong women,\u201d are the normalized characters. Were that not the case, I expect that his protagonists would just have been gay and been done with it.<\/p>\n

If the characters grabbed me, nothing else would matter, but they didn\u2019t, so my attention turned to the scenery. I know it\u2019s petty of me, but the whole sea-level rise thing is just badly done. Three hundred years on, the waters have risen to the 21st floor in NYC and the entire eastern seaboard is underwater all the way to Chicago. Seriously, you have to ask if the author has been to New York (he has, he lives there). For one thing, it\u2019s not flat, and what may be the 21st floor in the Battery is somewhere in the sub-sub basement on the Upper East Side. Not to mention the Palisades. Or what tides would do to all the lobbies that our gal wades her way through.<\/p>\n

If he\u2019d bothered to check the map he could have come up with a much more interesting landscape.(1) If he wants to go back to this waterlogged world again, and there\u2019s no reason he shouldn\u2019t, I recommend he read Paolo Bacigalupi\u2019s The Windup Girl<\/strong> or The Drowned Cities<\/strong> to see how it\u2019s done.<\/p>\n

I expect this book will find a fairly receptive audience, and that\u2019s fine, but I wanted a lot more\u00a0 but it never wound up delivering it. The writing is fairly good, but I never really connected with the main character. Like any noir<\/em> PI tale, the plot is twisty and the bad guys are always closer to you than you\u2019d like. Really, all it needs is a little more depth<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Links \/ References<\/p>\n

(1) 21 stories is about 250 ft, or 75 m. You can get an idea of what that means at: Geology.com: New York City, Long Island and Newark \u2013 Sea Level Rise Map; http:\/\/geology.com\/sea-level-rise\/new-york.shtml<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Depth by\u00a0Lev\u00a0AC\u00a0Rosen Review by Ernest Lilley Regan Arts. Hardcover \u00a0ISBN\/ITEM#: 1941393071 Date: 28 April 2015 List Price $24.95 Amazon US \/ Simone Pierce is a gumshoe in galoshes in a post-climate-change New York City that isn\u2019t so much Venice as it is Atlantis just before it slips beneath the waves. The water stopped rising at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,32,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mystery","category-reviews","category-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3834"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3834\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3852,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3834\/revisions\/3852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}