Book of the Day

From the review

Skotch takes the case in an alley that never sees daylight, counting the buttons in his paw before he counts the risk. This is Green City Wars in miniature: a solarpunk city built for the people who get to enjoy it, and a raccoon who works the parts of it nobody wants to look at. Adrian Tchaikovsky sets his noir mystery in New Vienna, where humans sunbathe on terraced rooftops while the animals who keep the city running were engineered for the job and never asked whether they wanted it. This science fiction premise holds up scene after scene: every uplifted creature here has a function stamped into its bones, from the Little Helpers wiring the grid at night to the runners moving cargo through pipes no human would fit down, and most of the drama comes from watching someone push against the job they were built for. The case itself is pure hardboiled plumbing, and Tchaikovsky runs it with a straight face. A mouse disappears carrying something everyone wants and nobody will name, the money on offer is suspiciously good, and Skotch takes the job anyway, because a raccoon PI who turns down suspiciously good money doesn't stay in business long. What elevates it past pastiche is how much civic machinery gets pulled into a case that should, on paper, be nobody's problem but a rodent's. Old grudges between species surface. Factions start jockeying before Skotch even has a suspect, and the arguments underneath them are recognizably political: who gets a vote in a city, who counts as a citizen versus a tool, and what happens once the tools start comparing notes. The title's wars turn out to be less a battle than a slow argument over who New Vienna actually belongs to, fought by creatures who were never consulted about building it in the first place.