Meet the last polite man on Earth.
Ringo Harms is fifty-five, Dutch, and has lived in Prague long enough to know exactly how the world got sick. He uses his indicator. He holds the door. He asks strangers "Good day, how are you doing?" — and then, unnervingly, waits for the answer. It is the most radical thing anyone does anymore, which is the whole problem.
Then a little old lady he helps across the street turns out to be the universe's last-resort auditor, Earth fails its audit, and Ringo is quietly handed the powers to do something about it: strength, speed, flight, invisibility. There's only one catch, and it's the funniest and cruellest rule in fiction — his true weapon isn't his fists, it's a joke. A real laugh at a true joke is the only thing that cures Selfishness, Arrogance and Dumbness, the engineered epidemic a boardroom of billionaires is selling to the whole species. The closer the joke gets to the line, the deeper it heals. Cross the line, and it feeds the enemy instead. And every lie Ringo tells drains his powers a little, which is a problem, because Ringo lies.
The Ringo Harms novels are a hilarious, savage, unreasonably warm superhero satire for anyone who's ever been the only person in the room who signalled. Expect billionaires getting exactly what they deserve, wellness retreats that should be illegal, a wife who ends riots with her laugh and powers a city with her cooking, a best friend bigotry physically cannot touch, a battle-royale strategy disguised as family game night, and a cat who is immune to the apocalypse because he never once pretends to be anything but an asshole.
Here's the pattern, book after book: the world hands Ringo a new name meant to shrink him — Dad Bod, and worse to come — and book after book, he takes it back and makes it his. The bullies grow up, get rich, and buy the playground; Ringo is the kid at the back of the class who finally learned to make the whole room laugh.
The audit is suspended. It is never closed. Which means there's always a next quarter, a next scheme, a next mocking name to reclaim — and a next reason to find out that kindness is a superpower.
Unfortunately.
