Synopsis:
Philip Marlowe meets Redwall in this superior adult noir tale, where all the characters are animals, fighting for survival in the city underneath the humans.
Down these mean streets a beast must walk…
Meet Skotch. Racoon, P.I.—Yours for a few buttons as long as the job isn’t too illegal, whatever that means.
A mouse has gone missing. Normally this wouldn’t raise any hackles, nor any alarms, but this mouse has something that everyone seems to want, though nobody appears particularly eager to say what that something is.
The fee is good—perhaps too good. Certainly not something Skotch can easily turn down.
If only Skotch can work out where the mouse is hiding, what he’s hiding, and why his secrets are upsetting a lot of animals caught up in the Green City wars.
Review:
I love cracking open a new Adrian Tchaikovsky book. I’m still working my way across the many books he’s written, but if I’ve noticed one thing about the author across the many words he’s penned over the years — he sure does love a non-human character. It might be an alien that completely upends any attempts by humanity to put it into a cage (Alien Clay and Shroud), or maybe a genetically-enhanced bioform like Rex, Honey, and Bees (Dogs of War). In all those books I was astounded at Tchaikovsky’s ability to put the reader in the shoes (or lack thereof) of some of these strange beings without personifying or stereotyping them.
With Green City Wars, Tchaikovsky is back with an entire book of animal characters, led by Skotch, a private investigator who just so happens to be a raccoon. But while humans exist, the animals here avoid them as a matter of survival. They operate as part of humanity’s existence (doing menial jobs that humanity has deemed too low for them), but they are to do those jobs without interacting with humans. Unlike some of those other books where he tries to avoid the typical stereotypes of non-human characters, Tchaikovsky leans in heavily with those stereotypes here, seemingly having a blast in the process.
I have to imagine that with every Shroud or Children of Strife that he puts out, Tchaikovsky has to have a little fun with a book like this or Service Model, playing some of the standard sci-fi tropes for laughs in the process.
Here, Skotch is your typical loveable loser you’d find in a detective noir story. He doesn’t always do the legal thing, but he’s a good man (raccoon) who’s heart is in the right place in his furry little body. As we unpack the mystery Skotch has to solve (finding one particular mouse in the entire city), we also get the fantastic world-building that Tchaikovsky has become known for. Each of the animals in Green City Wars has sentience — an awareness — thanks to a drug they need to take every so often. Without it, they revert back to their wild, feral form and they all know it. It creates a power dynamic where those with the drug are able to compel those without to do their bidding, whether it’s fair, legal, or otherwise.
This book was a ton of fun, but there were a few moments midway through where Skotch was spinning his wheels a bit and sometimes the info dumps became a little overdone, but once Green City Wars hit its stride, it was off and going.
History teacher aside — in the middle ages after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, there was very little in the way of a legal system. Thus, fights and arguments could quickly become generational blood feuds. So in many Germanic areas of Europe, a concept of wergild was established that literally placed a value on a person. Say I “accidentally” lopped off my neighbor’s arm…there was a whole spreadsheet that had the value of that arm on it. My family would simply pay that amount and the matter would be settled. Tchaikovsky brilliantly weaves an “animal” version of wergild into Green City Wars called “Mausgelt” where every animal’s life is based on the equivalent value of how many mice it would be as a replacement cost. Since the animals are operating their own society without much from humanity, it makes a ton of sense, especially considering where the book takes place.
From the audiobook front, the wonderful John Pirhalla takes the helm. After hearing him narrate Edward Ashton’s books like Mickey 7 and After the Fall, it’s clear that he has the perfect sci-fi voice for something that is serious, but may also be slightly comedic if the situation heads that way. As soon as he started on Green City Wars, I knew he was the right voice for the animal-centric story.
More often than not, you’re in for a treat when Adrian Tchaikovsky releases a new novel — you just have to know what you’re in for. Is it a heady space tome that will take a lot of brain power, or is it a seedy underground of talking animals trying to locate a mouse who may or may not have engaged in risky scientific experiments? I really enjoyed my time with Skotch and would definitely welcome a return trip to Green City in the future if his brain comes back to that area.
Thank you to Tor Publishing Group as well as Macmillan Audio for providing this book and audiobook for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
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