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Selected Crime Fiction Reviews
Selected Crime Fiction Reviews
I am bending my self-imposed rules about crime fiction more than a bit because the detective in this book isn't one in the traditional sense of the word. No, he is a fifty-plus bin man living in a council flat in Bracknell with something of a past.
He knows a lot about Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher who suggested that there are objects or events that cannot be known with the use of ordinary human senses or perceptions. Kant named this universe the noumenon as compared to his definition of a phenomenon which refers to anything that can be comprehended by human beings.
You will learn quite a lot about Kantian theory in this novel but, don't worry, it's painless and, rather to my surprise, truly interesting and absorbing. In Kant's original work The Thing Itself translates as Ding an Sich and you'll be coming across this phrase more than once.
In the 1980s, long before he became a bin man, Charles Gardner had another profession; a specialist astrophysicist stationed in the Antarctic searching for radio transmissions from deep space along with his colleague Roy Curtius. Only the two of them are stationed there so they are forced to maintain a veneer of civility despite a deep-rooted dislike of each other. Roy's complete lack of social skills and his conviction that his is the superior intellect leads him to experiment on his own with far-reaching consequences both in the Antarctic and long after they have returned home.
In the present day where most of the novel is set, something is about to happen that will reveal the unknowable Kantian universe to human senses. But what? When the answer is revealed it is so simple, plausible and obvious it will make your jaw drop while at the same time you are kicking yourself for not seeing it coming.
This is the launch pad for a tremendously imaginative novel and it is a tribute to Adam Robert's prodigious talent that he makes it so riveting and compulsive.
A brilliant read...and you'll probably learn a few things along the way. Currently available at Amazon in paperback at £8.99 or as a Kindle download for £3.99.