Mindspace Investigations

Prose-wise, over the weekend I enjoyed the first three Mindspace Investigations novels (Clean, Sharp, and Marked) by Alex Hughes. They’re quick reads, not too far from the urban/paranormal field despite being set several centuries in the future: first person POV, a telepath and recovering drug addict working for the Atlana police, generally with sexy workaholic cop as partner. I do see similarities to the Dresden Files (and to similar genre books), although frankly addiction & thought sensing are not quite as fun as monsters & magic. The post-Tech-Wars future, where the U.S. in particular is only slowly re-releasing advanced technology in the wake of disastrous misuse of networked and biological tech, has a lot of potential although at the moment it's a bit "fun tech like flying cars to establish a futuristic setting and low tech like lack of networked search capabilities for the average detective where it's plot convenient." Where Hughes excels, however, is in creating believably, frustratingly powerful antagonists (of both the cat-stroking and more interesting but infuriating it’s-all-just-part-of-living-within-a-corrupt-system varieties). I think it’s a little overly cute that we don’t learn our POV character’s name is “Adam” until the last page of Book 1, but it’s not really important to the story. While each book focuses on a primay case or two, there is some development overall of both the character relationships and of some over-arching conflicts. In fact, there are some surprising shake-ups in the third book that also lead to some significant character moments. (After reading these three titles, I stumbled across an online interview with the author in which she revealed that she’s sketched out a 9-book arc for the series, a detail I think bodes well for her continued ability to include procedural details without having the series seem to run in place.) In any case, clearly I’ve found the Mindspace Investigations novels to be pageturners so far.