Everyone in Carth has a reason not to talk to you.
Cera Holloway is a licensed private investigator with a prosthetic arm she calls Sparky, a daughter to raise, and a city that charges extra for everything. She has one rule: never ask a question that pays badly. Then a dockworker named Akema Sorkin goes missing, a Blackline crew shows up at the wrong door, and the questions start coming for her instead.
Cera used to hunt people for money. Now she finds them with a licence, a fee schedule and a slightly better conscience, and she is still deciding which one counts for more. Carth runs on rules, rumours and credit, and she knows how to work all three. What she does not know is how long she can keep her daughter out of it.
Zora is eleven, sharp-tongued, and hiding something that makes the lights flicker and the clocks skip. Somebody has noticed.
Carth is a micro-city stacked in rain-slicked rings on the industrial planet of Saelis, under purple skies and a very long memory. Down in the lower levels, deals are made in doorways, information is sold by the sentence, and nobody forgets what happened ten years ago. Blackline, Helion and Viridian all want something that is waking up below the city, and they do not care who stands between them and it. Cera has spent eleven years keeping Zora out of the files. Now the files have her name on them.
To find out what is going on, Cera will have to work with people she does not trust, talk to people who would rather she did not, and put up with a doctor who sounds like a Vulcan with a medical licence. Zora, meanwhile, has opinions about all of it. Loudly. Repeatedly. Usually while someone is trying to sneak past a guard.
Along the way you will meet couriers, captains, corporate men, street runners, medics and a people with their own language and their own ways. A few details look small. Hang on to them.
If you like detective stories with a rough edge, science fiction with a city you can almost smell, and families who love each other badly and loudly, this one is for you. You do not need to know anything about the series first. The story starts here.
City of Carth is a cyberpunk noir with a mother and daughter at its centre, a sarcastic voice, a mystery that does not give up its secrets all at once, and an ending that will make you want the next book right now.
City of Carth is Book One of The Shards, a seven-book series.
Welcome to Carth. Keep your hands where people can see them, keep your receipts where you can, and do not trust the quiet ones.
Autorentext
Sarah King is an Autistic artist, musician and writer from Alberta, Canada. She publishes under her own imprint, Sakura Studios®, The Shards is her cyberpunk-noir series, and City of Carth is Book One.