Book Review: Titanium Noir

One of my goals for 2025 is to keep track of what I read. No idea how many books I'll go through this year, but whether I enjoy them or not, I'll post a blurb and brief review. All of them will be speculative fiction in some form—genres I gravitate toward in my own writing.

First up is the future-crime standalone novel Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway. Here's the description:

Cal Sounder is a detective working for the police on certain very sensitive cases. So when he’s called in to investigate a homicide at a local apartment, he’s surprised by the routineness of it all. But when he arrives on scene, Cal soon learns that the victim—Roddy Tebbit, an otherwise milquetoast techie—is well over seven feet tall. And although he doesn’t look a day over thirty, he is ninety-one years old. Tebbit is a Titan, one of this dystopian society’s genetically altered elites. And this case is definitely Cal’s thing.

I enjoyed Cal's first-person narration. He's Rockford-like in the best way, and I was rooting for him from the start. Some of the other characters, while interesting, were unfortunately two-dimensional, and the foul language on every page was a turnoff, but otherwise I enjoyed this tale of giants among us, some of whom are forgetting what it means to be human as they strive to become "more than." And as with any noir tale worth its salt, this one had plenty of attitude and poetic turns-of-phrase that made me smile.

Unlike my own Dome City Investigations or Charlie Madison, P.I. series, this book takes place closer to our own time, but there were enough futuristic aspects to keep me intrigued. Similar to The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters, there's a sense of foreboding and doom lurking in the background, so the happy-ish ending of Titanium Noir came as a welcome surprise. 

Overall, a good read. Solid 4 out of 5 stars.
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