A Future When Old-Fashioned Detective Work Returns
The Wild Dead is the sequel to the Philip K. Dick
Award–winning novel by Carrie Vaughn, Bannerless.
If you
miss murder investigations where the solution comes from old-fashion questioning
and playing hunches rather than hi-tech, The
Wild Dead is for you. Enid, the
heroine of the series, catches her killers with legwork – literally. That’s because author Vaughn has set these
mysteries in a future dystopia, where high-tech forensics is gone and investigators
walk to the scene of the crime…or catch the occasional solar car. More on this unusual mix of high and no-tech
later.
Character
development is a strength of the book.
Enid, for example, wasn’t a protagonist I immediately liked. Initially, she is indecisive, torn between
what she feels to be right and a host of issues – questions of jurisdiction,
complaints from her partner, desire to be home.
But she persists, eventually succeeding through a combination of grit
and intelligence. The secondary
characters are similarly brought to life under Vaughn’s pen. Kudos to the author. World-building is also a strength. You can almost see, feel, and even smell the
mud and debris of our decaying world, while lives built around agriculture,
scavenging, hunting, and trading feel real.
Plot and
pace, however, are weaker features of the work.
With few investigative tools other than questioning, clues come
slowly. But unfortunately, the book
makes the reader work for them too, with a style that is plodding at
times. This problem is magnified by the
repetition of thoughts, themes, and dialog.
For example, Enid constantly evaluates each person’s home, because part
of her job is detecting the waste of resources.
But as this duty has little to do with the murder and so, doesn’t
advance the plot, these sections end up feeling like filler. Vaughn also made some ‘convenient’ decisions
about which parts of technology to bring forward to her dystopia and which to
leave in the past. Medicine, for
example, was saved by a decision of the survivors of ‘the Fall’, but forensics
was not, despite the significant overlap between these fields. Solar energy was another technology kept,
explaining the solar cars and house lighting.
But the infrastructure to maintain medicine and solar power is no where
to be seen. It ends up being a strange
and somewhat inexplicable mix of our high-tech past and an austere future.
Overall,
Vaughn’s vibrant characters and her vivid accounts of a future, decaying world
are winners, weakened only slightly by pace and decisions about technology that
are convenient for the plot, but not easily explained.
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