Among all the Dan Simmons book I’ve been reading in the last few weeks, I think this is the weakest, while also suggesting a much tighter, better book within. Perhaps that’s why he followed this book up with three shorter noir books in the Joe Kurtz series. He creates an interesting character, a former Marine sniper who later became a transportation crash expert through a doctorate and work on the Challenger explosion (this is the second thing I’ve read that Dan Simmons wrote about the Challenger exploding). We begin with the character Darwin (hrm) being called to the scene of some kind of crash in which a car has been complete demolished in the middle of nowhere. It’s a puzzle that he’s able to solve while also meeting with a federal government crash investigator (a lady — ooo). On his way home he’s attacked on the road by gunmen in another car and uses his driving skills to knock them over a cliff, and he’s initially arrested for vehicular homicide, which ends up being leverage to get him to help investigate what turns out to be a large conspiratorial ring of insurance fraud.
So it goes from there as he explores the crime, explores the lady, and explores his past. So what’s bad about it? Well something convinces writers that when they write a noir novel, kind of out of character (and Simmons in the middle of a phase), they love to pepper it with noirish language, that is so often bad and claggy. Just be a good writer! Another major issue is that clearly Dan Simmons did a lot of research for this novel, and damned if you’re not going to hear every freaking thing he learned while writing it. It’s too much.