THE WEEPING SILENCE

In a corporate/authoritarian future, a police detective tries to rescue his journalist wife when they are both targeted by a deadly conspiracy to sanction slavery in the United States.

Gurgu opens an SF series based on the potent political premise of a capitalism-yoked, tech-choked Earth of the not-too-distant future embracing slavery as an accepted economic engine. Following eco-collapse, war, and the “Black Crisis” that wrought 80% unemployment, corporations formed their own union to dictate terms most favorable to their survival. In Britain of all places, this notion takes root as institutionalized “servitude.” Whole families with missed debt payments—which encompass almost everyone—can be seized and enslaved. In an America dominated by a monolithic Republican Party, this harsh system is about to be approved under the breathtakingly hypocritical “Freedom Act.” But already, entrepreneurs have broken the law in creating clandestine slave-processing centers (and mass graves). Hard-charging New York City Police Department detective Blake Frye (think Liam Neeson meets Gerard Butler, but tougher) is blissfully married to crusading investigative journalist Amy, whose career derailed when she identified prominent businessman William Wilmot as an underground slave magnate. Wilmot bought her TV network, seeking to dispose of everyone connected to the report. Now, with Amy one of Wilmot’s few surviving enemy-list targets, Frye reluctantly goes to grim, protest-wracked London for a secret rendezvous. It seems even British servitude companies are horrified by the prospect of the lucrative American slave market being monopolized under ruthless Wilmot and want Frye to remove the threat. Upon returning to the “land of the free,” Frye and Amy are imperiled by the corrupt Department of Homeland Customs and Border Security and everyone on Wilmot’s secret payroll. Even with a recursive narrative structure that regularly flashes back to account for how this ordeal came about, the novel keeps the momentum rolling along, and readers will feel chained to what happens next. And lest one wonder how Donald Trump factors into this dystopian vision, Frye ponders that the year 2017 was when everything started going wrong. The author chooses to have Frye afflicted with obsessive-compulsive disorder, a trait that supposedly sharpens his deductive skills. But this portrayal also recalls TV’s whimsical, OCD–ridden crime-buster Adrian Monk, a jarring contrast when pyrotechnics and cliffhangers reminiscent of a 007 spectacle break loose.

Cartoony action elements don’t blunt the anger of this bracing SF thriller about slavery.