A sci-fi noir thriller set in a far future world where beliefs can unbalance the scales of justice.A novel featuring the multi-award–winning team J. H. Williams III (Echolands, Batwoman, Promethea), S. David Johnson (Where We Live), Langdon Foss (Get Jiro), Dave Stewart (Echolands, Hellboy), and Bernardo Brice (Where We Live, Shazam). The cracking: the world shook. Seas rose. Shapes of lands changed. Heat brought boiling. Lakes dried. Harvests withered. Death rode on radiation. Mountains moved through time, shifting sands to new vistas. When grasses grew tall again, forests rerooted. Life went on. And people flourished once more. New societies and technologies prospered. New Silica is born, a brilliant city of shining colorful glass, now on the cusp of a new dawn. A city that Inspector Duel Rahmone loves, living between a past of archaic beliefs and a more fair future, desperately trying to navigate a world standing on a black-and-white morality but all too often is only grey. Obsessed with nearly forgotten history, Duel dreams of pulp adventure, hard-nosed detectives, and smoky mysteries. But those dreams spiral him down a path of danger, deception, and murder. Hired by the enigmatic Aurora to discover the truth about her sister’s grace killing — a legal act at the hands of her sister’s husband — the inspector enters a dangerous cat-and-mouse game with one of the city’s most respected businessmen, putting all Duel holds dear in peril and risking corruption of his own philosophical ideals to shed light in dark, locked high-rise backrooms of the rich and powerful.
