Philip Marlowe meets Redwall in this superior adult noir tale, where all the characters are animals, fighting for survival in the city underneath the humans.Down these mean streets a beast must walk...Meet Skotch. Racoon, P.I.—Yours for a few buttons as long as the job isn't too illegal, whatever that means.A mouse has gone missing. Normally this wouldn't raise any hackles, nor any alarms, but this mouse has something that everyone seems to want, though nobody appears particularly eager to say what that something is.The fee is good—perhaps too good. Certainly not something Skotch can easily turn down.If only Skotch can work out where the mouse is hiding, what he's hiding, and why his secrets are upsetting a lot of animals caught up in the Green City wars.
This book was painful to finish, so I begrudgingly spread the last few pages over a couple of days. Occasionally, you get a book where the appropriate response to finish it is grief that it's over. A sort of "Well, what do I do now?"
I can't know for sure, but I get the feeling this book takes place in the same universe as Dogs of War, and that the bioforms are possibly just a repurposement of that technology. I really loved the characters in this one, especially the protagonist, Skotch, but also some of the bigger gang leaders. As a Brit, I have to appreciate the tensions between Red and Grey squirrels being played out as two opposing militaries. I'm a stumbling newborn in the genre of detective noir, but I certainly enjoyed the plot and trying to keep all the rival factions in mind. The world felt very immersive and I never felt overwhelmed despite a huge cast of characters because of the factions.
The story itself felt like a light bit of advocacy for Universal Basic Income or something similar, but in a more fantastical counterpart, since we're dealing with talking animals. While reading over, I kept mulling over the existential threat to the Little Helpers (the animals), because I can't really think of a human equivalent to such a dissolution of personality outside of critical illnesses like dementia, which are suitably terrifying. Though, the plight in this book is scarier because it's "if you ever get sick you get dementia x1000" and the only way you escape that is if someone finds you useful enough to subdue you and force you back into sentience and servitude. The horror of it is ruminated on in the story, but I feel like the premise honestly could have been milked more for its awfulness. I imagine that the subtlety is going to lead to a lack of impact with some readers.
Overall, I highly recommend the book to people who enjoy hard sci-fi and interesting worlds. Not sure how it will hit with the noir loving people.