The United States has splintered into several states after its Secession, including a fundamentalist belt derogatorily called "Jesusland." The Western Nations Colony Initiative—COLIN—has established a flourishing albeit harsh and violent base on Mars, something of a Coventry for unwanted types. Several strains of genetically engineered humans—twists—exist, many of whom have ended up on Mars. Orbital realms are accessed by a variety of space elevators. Limited nanotech is a reality.

Yet people still live in much the same way: going to work, relaxing, loving—and committing crimes. Hence the need for such law officers as Sevgi Ertekin (a woman of Turkish ethnicity) and Tom Norton, inspectors for COLIN. Sevgi and Tom are now facing one of the biggest cases of their lives. A spaceship from Mars has crashed into the Pacific Ocean rather than stopping in orbit to offload via elevators. Inside are the slaughtered and cannibalized remains of the cryonically suspended passengers. It appears there was a stowaway, one Allen Merrin, who, unfrozen amid no food supplies, subsisted on the grisly fare. Now Merrin is loose on the home planet, and he's a thirteen.

The thirteens are bio-twisted throwbacks to a caveman humanity, when the toughest, meanest killers were the best survivors and the race's hope. As Merrin embarks on a seemingly gratuitous killing spree now, there's only one way to stop him: with a fellow thirteen.

That would be Carl Marsalis, a black man from the United Kingdom who earns his living with the United Nations, tracking down criminals. As the book opens, we've seen Carl in deadly action. But a misstep lands him in a Jesusland prison. Sevgi and Tom free him to work on the Merrin case, an investigation that will take the trio from the West Coast of the U.S. to New York to Istanbul to South America and back, dodging mortal danger all the while.

Carl's all business at first, just working to earn his freedom. But he doesn't count on the complication of falling in love with Sevgi.

Or on the fact that Allen Merrin didn't reach Earth on his own initiative. He has powerful backers here who want to stop Carl literally dead in his tracks.

Cinematic future noir

The standard tropes of noir fiction—the toolkit, if you will—like those of any genre, are both the genre's strength and its weak point. They offer structure, resonance and power. They can also lead to predictability, longueurs and stereotypes. When you blend noir with SF, as has been done for the past half century, ever since Bester's The Demolished Man (1953), you introduce another whole layer of pluses and minuses, based on whether the author's SF speculations are strong or weak, well-matched to the noir elements or jarring.

As Richard Morgan has proven in his previous work, he's highly adept at walking the tightrope between success and failure in this revivification-of-an-old-genre balancing act. Here, as before, he generally succeeds admirably, investing his prose with a believability and zest that belie the age of his chosen literary contraption. His plotting is convoluted yet easy to follow. His dialogue crackles. His characters are never cardboard. His dialogue is crisp. He strews red herrings about, but ultimately plays fair with clues. His moral compass is strong.

As for his SF conceits, he's really onto some hot-button issues of genetics, race, gender and Darwinism. His political projections rock as well.

Nonetheless I found myself wearying just a little at the standard assortment of parts. The damaged loner hero. The tough female cop who falls for him. The loyal work partner. The familial treachery. The institutional corruption and blindness. (And the fact that Carl and Merrin don't come face to face until three-fifths of the way through the book seemed a dubious move as well.) I know these are the essential grand themes of noir that provide the frissons, but ...

Perhaps my weariness stems from the length of the book. It's hard to point to any bloat, either section by section or in Morgan's fine prose, but it's still certainly not a streamlined affair.

On Amazon you can find an omnibus of three Chandler novels—The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell, My Lovely (1940) and The High Window (1942)—that clocks in at some 700 pages—not much longer than Thirteen alone. No one ever accused Chandler of being simplistic or truncated or not vivid enough. Like the ideal of Carl Marsalis, he knew how to get in fast, do the dirty but necessary job and get out clean.