Finch

September 14, 2009
VanderMeer's third book set in the fungus-laden city of Ambergris is an engrossing recasting of the hard-boiled detective novel. Traditional tropes—femmes fatales, double-crossing agents, underworld crime lords—mix seamlessly with a world in which humans struggle to undermine the authority of sentient fungi a century after the events of 2006's Shriek: An Afterword
. By the time titular detective Finch solves the double murder of a human and a fungus, he's been drawn into a conflict in which he's rarely sure who's manipulating him or why he's so important to their plans. VanderMeer's stark tone is brutally powerful at times, and his deft mix of genre-blurring style with a layered plot make this a joy to read. Though the book stands well on its own, fans of the earlier Ambergris novels will appreciate it even more.

September 15, 2009
The latest in World Fantasy Award–winner Vandermeer's Ambergris cycle (Shriek: An Afterword, 2008, etc.) pits a dogged detective against…just about everyone.

An upstart species known as the gray caps has emerged as the power in the once-renowned city of Ambergris, now a crumbling place of decay and despair. Blame the vengeful gray caps for that. As the Ambergrisian underclass, they eked out a subterranean existence, manifestly in thrall to human superiority. But six years ago, the Rising placed Ambergris totally in the gray caps' tyrannical hands. Now Finch, a detective, finds himself reporting to a being who speaks to underlings in often impenetrable clicks and whistles, though no one in their bare-bones police station would risk disobeying these commands. The bizarre double murder of a gray cap and a human shakes up the status quo. Finch's boss seems intensely interested in the crime. Does it have something to do with the mysterious Lady in Blue, elusive leader of a growing counterinsurgency? Soon other intensely interested parties appear with a multiplicity of arcane agendas, to all of which Finch somehow seems key and in all of which his best interests are clearly not paramount.

Only for the faithful; anyone else will find the plot opaque and largely incomprehensible.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

October 15, 2009
This is the third novel set in VanderMeers fantastic city of Ambergris. After many years of civil war, the city is now occupied by the mushroom-and-spore-wielding gray caps, who came up from their underground caverns to take over after the civil wars decimated the city. Dictatorial rulers, the gray caps care little for the human population, viewing them as only useful for completing the mysterious Tower, or, in the case of Finch, working as a detective to keep the citizenry happy. When Finch is tasked with solving the murder of an old man found in an abandoned apartment next to the upper body of a gray cap, he soon realizes that in order to save his city and himself he must solve the murder before the Tower is completed. With appeal both to noir and to fantasy fans, this dark, moody tale is sure to widen VanderMeers readership. A good read-alike for urban fantasy fans, and especially for those who enjoyed China Mi'villes The City & the City (2009).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)