Killing Time

Carr has made his name with two splendid historical mystery stories - The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness - set in New York in the 1890s, both tracing the birth of psychiatry and its application to crime and detection. Anyone expecting more of the same from his new novel will be greatly surprised as Carr has leapfrogged the 20th century entirely and set Killing Time in the year 2023. Although it begins with a murder and the involvement of criminal psychologist Dr Gideon Wolfe to help the grieving widow of the victim (in a scene reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes), the story soon takes off into a futuristic fable involving control of the Internet and a conspiracy to distort history to prove that information alone is not knowledge. Wolfe is drawn into an intellectual rebellion financed, ironically, by the profits from the World Wide Web. Profits are so huge that the rebels can afford a secret base, weapons and a spaceship worthy of anything found in Star Wars. As their attempts to show up how easy it is to distort information on the Internet backfire, a desperate chase ensues across the world, from Scotland to Malaysia to Russia, in pursuit of a renegade Israeli agent armed with a nuclear device. In their attempts to show the truth, the rebels find themselves responsible for killing not only people, but possibly time itself. Fans of Carr's earlier works, which brilliantly illuminate the New York of the past, may well be disturbed by his vision of the future, but fans of Jules Verne will love it. Review by MIKE RIPLEY Editor's note: Mike Ripley's Lights, Camera, Angel! Will be published in April (Kirkus UK)