Finch (Ambergris Trilogy #3)

by Jeff VanderMeer

Overview

From Jeff VanderMeer, the author of Borne and Annihilation, comes the paperback reissue of his cult classic Finch.

In a deserted tenement in an occupied city, two dead bodies lie on a dusty floor as if they have fallen out of the air. One corpse is cut in half, the other is utterly unmarked. One is human, the other isn’t. The city of Ambergris is half ruined, rotten, its population controlled by narcotics, internment camps, and acts of terror. But its new masters want this case closed, urgently. Detective John Finch has just one week to solve it or be sent to the camps. With no ID for the victims, no clues, no leads, and precious little hope, Finch’s fate hangs in the balance.

But there is more to this case than meets the eye. Enough to put Finch in the crosshairs of every spy, rebel, informer, and traitor in town. Under the shadow of the eldrich tower the occupiers are raising above the city, Finch is about to come face-to-face with a series of mysteries that will change him and Ambergris forever. Why does one of the victims most resemble a man thought to have been dead for a hundred years? What is the murders’ connection to an attempted genocide nearly six hundred years ago? And just what is the secret purpose of the occupiers’ tower?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374538613
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	01/11/2022
Series:	Ambergris Trilogy , #3
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	145,368
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Jeff VanderMeer is the author of Hummingbird Salamander, the Borne novels (Borne, Strange Bird, and Dead Astronauts), and The Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation, Acceptance, and Authority), the first volume of which won the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award and was adapted into a movie by Alex Garland. He speaks and writes frequently about issues relating to climate change as well as urban rewilding. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, on the edge of a ravine, with his wife, Ann VanderMeer, and their cat, Neo.

Editorial Reviews

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. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

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.

Kirkus Reviews