Soho Press

A futuristic fusion of noir, adventure, thriller, and horror, the second installment in the acclaimed Water City Trilogy explores how dystopia might be right around the next century’s corner.

Year 2150: Eight years after the murder of Akira Kimura, Water City’s renowned scientist and anointed “God,” the nameless antihero who once risked everything to find Akira’s killer is no longer a detective, but a stay-at-home dad. While his wife climbs the corporate ladder of the Water City Police Department, he raises his now nine-year-old daughter and occasionally takes the odd job as a bounty hunter.

Water City’s domestic bliss is threatened when Ascalon’s Scar—the permanent mark left by the elimination of Sessho-seki, an asteroid that nearly wiped out life on Earth—vanishes from the sky and a familiar face thought dead returns from the ocean depths to exact revenge on humanity. What follows is a wild journey, both deep below and high above a futuristic Pacific, that takes Water City’s antihero from Lucky Cat City (formerly Osaka, Japan) to the moon and back, all to stop the destruction of the last of the human race.

Hawai’i author Chris McKinney’s cinematic, immersive follow-up to Midnight, Water City explores technology, class, climate change, and the lengths desperate people will go to in order to protect the ones they love.