New York is in its last death throws. The victim of numerous terrorist attacks, the city has been abandoned by the majority of the rich, leaving a poor and decimated population to eke out an existence while the transport systems succumb to entropy. Spademan, once a garbage man, whose life took a turn for the worst when his wife was killed in one of the attacks, now hires his box-cutter out to anyone who will pay for an assassination...

Shovel Ready (paperback, 243 pages), written by Adam Sternbergh, is a bleak dystopian ride through a world falling into decay. In this futuristic noir novel we follow Spademan, not his real name; it came from something he saw written on a container. As he meanders through the city, we do likewise through his mind.

He is hired to track down and kill a young girl after he is convinced that she is over eighteen, for our killer has his own sense of morality, he will kill no one under age. Tracking her through the wasteland, which New York has become, he finds her, only to discover that she is pregnant. So, against his better judgement, rather than kill her he takes her in, while he tries to work out why her father wanted her killed.

His quest takes him through what is left of society where the wealthy spend their lives almost permanently connected to virtual reality worlds, guarded in the real world by guards and tube fed by attending nurses, they have all but given up on reality to live in constructs of their own imaginations.

Shovel Ready is a brutal book to read, not so much the imagery, much of which have become common science fiction tropes, but because of the sparsest use of language. Sternbergh has pared back all the extraneous details to produce a novel which is at the same time witty and stiletto sharp.

Very little of the book contains traditional paragraphs, rather you get a series of short sentences. If you stand back from the page, some of them look like lists, rather than a coherent story. But this allows the book to take you through the tale at a breakneck speed and once opened you're unlikely to want to put the book down.

Appropriate to a noir novel the story is told from the perspective of our protagonist, Spademan, as he winds his way through the decay of the city. The backstory of how this happened, and what became of his wife, is wound around the current narrative. It works well and has the feel of an old Dashiell Hammett novel. It’s like watching Sam Spade if he had become a hit man and I’m sure the similarity of the names is not a coincidence.

It is an impressive first novel and in Spademan Sternbergh has created an antihero who could carry his own series, especially as a lot of this new worlds detail is omitted, leaving much to discover in subsequent books.

8

Charles Packer