The Night Market

by Jonathan Moore Narrated by James Patrick Cronin

Overview

It's late Thursday night, and Inspector Ross Carver is at a crime scene in one of the city's last luxury homes. The dead man on the floor is covered by an unknown substance that's eating through his skin. Before Carver can identify it, six FBI agents burst in and remove him from the premises. He's pushed into a disinfectant trailer, forced to drink a liquid that sends him into seizures, and is shocked unconscious. On Sunday he wakes in his bed to find his neighbor, Mia-who he's barely ever spoken to-reading aloud to him. He can't remember the crime scene or how he got home; he has no idea two days have passed. Mia says she saw him being carried into their building by plainclothes police officers, who told her he'd been poisoned. Carver doesn't really know this woman and has no way of disproving her, but his gut says to keep her close.



A mind-bending, masterfully plotted thriller-written in Moore's "lush, intoxicating style" (Justin Cronin)-that will captivate fans of Blake Crouch, China Miéville, and Lauren Beukes, The Night Market follows Carver as he works to find out what happened to him, soon realizing he's entangled in a web of conspiracy that spans the nation. And that Mia may know a lot more than she lets on.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Audio

05/28/2018
Moore’s unusual new novel is both a love story and a cyberpunk police procedural, read dramatically and with appealing sensitivity by actor Cronin. Set in a slightly futuristic San Francisco, it begins with detective Ross Carver and his partner Cleve Jenner being called to a horrific crime scene late at night and being confronted by cold and impersonal FBI agents in hazmat suits who force them into a decontamination shower. A few days later, Carver awakens in his apartment, where he is in the care of his neighbor, the beautiful Mia Westcott. He has no memory of the night he visited the crime scene or the days since; it turns out neither does Cleve. Cronin captures the detective’s mixture of groggy confusion over what happened to him and his curiosity about the mysterious Mia—he doesn’t quite trust her, but he wants to and hopes she can lead him to an explanation of his disturbing blackout. That she does, with considerable detection on his and Cleve’s part, but with the revelation comes the discovery of a massively malevolent plot. Cronin’s performance adds depth and dimension to Moore’s disturbing portrait of an honorable man and an empathic woman who take a stand against evil. A Houghton Mifflin Harcourt hardcover. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 10/23/2017
Moore (The Dark Room) sets this outstanding SF noir in a near-future San Francisco, where ocean current changes have made the rain nearly continuous, electric cars prowl the streets, and disposable LED postcard ads seduce the citizenry. When SFPD Det. Ross Carver and his partner, Cleve Jenner, answer a late-night summons to an expensive home, they find something odd: a man’s body “that looked like gray moss. Like a carpet of it spread across a rot-shrunken log.” Hazmat-suited FBI agents take over the crime scene and send the two to a portable decontamination unit. Ross awakens in his bed days later with his mysterious neighbor, the beautiful Mia Westcott, attending to him. He has no memory of that night, only the sense that something is wrong and a lingering metallic scent to guide him. Moore smoothly fills Carver’s quest for the truth with equal parts hidden menace and outright strangeness. This mystery feels like Blade Runner as if it were written by Charles De Lint or Neil Gaiman. Agent: Alice Martell, Martell Agency. (Jan.)

From the Publisher

Praise for The Night Market Named an Exciting Mystery/Thriller of Winter 2018 by Bookish Named an iBooks Most Anticipated Mystery/Thriller of Winter 2018 Named a Best Mystery of 2018 by Maxim Jakuboswki, CrimeTime “A grim and gripping tale of well-earned paranoia…Moore, an attorney, uses his tight-lipped prose to fine effect… The book’s tone is Chandleresque, the conspiracy worrying Carver and Jenner expands to Pynchonean proportions, and the physical ick they encounter might have oozed out of a Cronenberg movie. But on the whole, I’ll wager, ‘The Night Market’ and its predecessors, ‘The Poison Artist’ and ‘The Dark Room,’ are like nothing you’ve ever read. In his acknowledgments, Moore sums up the novels as ‘a three-panel painting of San Francisco.’ As done, he might have added, by Hieronymus Bosch.” — Washington Post "Are you one of the many who have cleared their Netflix queue of good television crime drama? Still trying to scratch that sci-fi itch as you wait for 'Westworld' to return? Well, Jonathan Moore’s latest thriller The Night Market will satiate both desires and satisfy both itches immediately...It's “Miami Vice” meets “The Matrix,” and George Orwell is hosting the party. What keeps The Night Market chugging along are those Crockett and Tubbs moments between Carver and Jenner. Mr. Moore’s handling of the partnership exemplifies the chemistry that you’d expect from two battle-scarred vets. The chapters that revolve around their relationship are ones that you won’t want to end...The reader is invested in every little moment of Carver’s detective work. Mr. Moore does such smooth work when describing Ross’ deductive mind that you buy that he's been on the force as long as his five years from mandatory retirement indicates. His self-confidence along with how he handles himself in every situation creates a protagonist one can easily get behind...In between the melding of sci-fi and crime noir, the glue that holds it all together is the engaging relationship between Carter and Mia. Their budding romance isn't forced or mushy, but is developed very organically throughout the book. It never interferes with the looming mystery and helps to cultivate more questions." —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette "As upsetting and revealing a book as you are likely to read in this or any year...Mystery and thriller readers will find much to love here, but fans of science fiction also should embrace this incredible work." — Bookreporter.com "If you’re looking for a good book to curl up with and lull you to sleep, don’t read Jonathan Moore’s The Night Market—it’ll keep you awake all night... In the vein of stories by Blake Crouch or China Mieville, The Night Market completes what Moore calls a 'three-panel painting of San Francisco—a single work, loosely connected.' Reading the other books in Moore’s series—The Poison Artist andThe Dark Room—isn’t necessary, but once you’ve read this one, you’ll be compelled to seek them out anyway. Just be prepared to lose some sleep while reading them." — Bookpage "In THE NIGHT MARKET, Jonathan Moore is masterful at sustaining cutting-edge suspense. The undertones of conspiracy and speculative science fiction blend perfectly with that suspense to make this a phenomenal thriller." — FreshFiction.com "A sharp and scary near-future thril —

Library Journal - Audio

09/15/2018
Ross Carver, an inspector with the San Francisco police force, investigates a murder in one of the city's last luxury neighborhoods. It quickly becomes apparent that neither the crime nor the city is exactly what it might seem. The fast-paced, detective novel takes place in a San Francisco beset with high crime and obsessive consumerism, and both play integral roles to the mystery at the heart of the action. The chain of events that follows Carver's initial discovery are so twisted and unbelievable they're impossible to ignore, but as Carver and his partner Jenner dive deeper into the murder, they, along with the listener, come ever closer to revealing not just the crime Carver thought he was solving but a conspiracy so large it will rip through the very heart of the world the inspector knows. What starts out as a familiar detective story quickly evolves into an examination of the dangers of greed, isolation, and the reaches of technology. Read by James Patrick Cronin and set in a dystopian San Francisco at some unknown time in the future, the observations and warnings couched within the plot will linger with listeners long after Ross Carver has said goodbye. VERDICT Moore elevates what could be a familiar detective-stumbles-onto-crime-ring novel into a timely thriller with unpredictable twists and outcomes. ["Readers of noir mysteries as well as lovers of near-futuristic sf will adore this title": LJ Xpress Reviews 1/5/18 review of the Houghton Harcourt hc.]—Samantha Facciolo, New York

MAY 2018 - AudioFile

San Francisco is a crumbling near-future hellscape in Moore’s latest audiobook, narrated by James Patrick Cronin. Homicide Inspector Ross Carver and his partner aren’t sure what to make of a body they find that is seemingly being eaten away by a moss-like substance. Minutes after their discovery, they are shoved into a decontamination chamber and drugged unconscious by the FBI. Carver wakes up much later with no memory of the incident and sets out to investigate his lost days and the mysterious events surrounding them. Cronin’s commanding voice and terse delivery capture the novel’s unique blend of classic noir and dark science fiction reminiscent of the movie BLADE RUNNER. Though the story is grim, it’s compelling from start to finish. A.T.N. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2017-10-11
A sharp and scary near-future thriller that delivers a dark message about society's love affair with technology.After being called to an upscale home, San Francisco Homicide Inspector Ross Carver and his partner find a horror show, a dead body that's been eaten away by something that's left it looking like "gray moss. Like a carpet of it spread across a rot-shrunken log." The cops are still getting their bearings when they're ushered out by the FBI , hustled into a disinfectant chamber, then rendered unconscious. Carver wakes to find his mysterious neighbor, Mia Westcott, by his bedside, but he can't remember the past two days. Mia seems oddly eager to help him investigate, but he can't quite trust her. A game of cat and mouse, punctuated with gruesome murder, ensues, revealing a far-reaching, reprehensible plot. Moore's subtly futuristic San Francisco, beset by the buzzing of drones, crumbling buildings, and gangs of copper thieves, sets the ugliness of the physically and morally decaying city against scenes of ostentatious and very conspicuous consumption. A shocking act of violence at a luxury store between rabid patrons and out-of-control police officers is an eye-opener, as is one of the few things, besides the smell of ozone, that Carver remembers from his missing days: the Fairmont Hotel "draped entirely in black fabric, the gauzy cloth tied in place with red silk ribbons that circled the building." There are no easy answers at the culmination of Moore's unsettling, stylish noir, the third in a loosely connected trilogy set in San Francisco (The Dark Room, 2017, etc.). Good thing Carver isn't the type to give in or give up. The not-quite-nihilistic yet still utterly shocking revelations in the third act are the stuff of nightmares.You'll never look at a flock of sparrows the same way again.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171359683
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	01/16/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	379,620

Read an Excerpt

1

Carver pulled to the curb behind the chassis of a burned-out car.

Across the intersection was the billboard, six spotlights along the bottom. They shined upward, lighting the sign, throwing its shadow across the vacant building behind it. The rest of the neighborhood was dead. A moonscape of abandoned warehouses, everything picked over twice. Walls punched in with crowbars, wires and plumbing stripped out. Even the streetlights were gone; in Bay View and Hunter’s Point, copper was worth more than light. Kids were creeping in from the edges to steal bricks now. They could take them by the bucketload to the salvage yards south of town and trade them for day-old bread. He knew about that from last night.

But no one had touched the sign. Maybe it made them feel better, having it lit. He turned on the windshield wipers so he could see it clearly. He thought about getting out of the car. He’d be able to see all of it if he walked to the middle of the intersection. He’d almost done that last night, too, when he’d been lost in the dark, driving back from the scene. Shaking still, from the gunfire. Tonight he’d driven this way just to see it again. He didn’t have any business here. No one did.

The sign was brand new, but he couldn’t imagine who would have put it here. A place like this? They might as well have buried it in the desert.

It was selling perfume, a fragrance called Black Aria. The woman in the ad was an actress. He knew her face but not her name. His grandfather might have known. Elizabeth something? Or Audrey, maybe. She lay on her stomach, her chin propped in her hands. Her knees were bent so that her bare toes pointed straight up. She was surely nude underneath the black sheet that was draped over her, covering no more than it had to. Sheet or not, every curve was there, defined in bare skin or beneath the indents and contours of satin.

It was all digitized, of course. Just another seamless fake. The real Elizabeth, or Audrey, wouldn’t have posed like this. Not back then, whenever she was alive, and not to sell perfume. People used to have standards. But those were gone now and they weren’t coming back. Like the burned-out car, like the whole of Hunter’s Point. The bottle hovered above her bare shoulder blades, the crystal vial so thick it looked like ice. The liquid inside was the color of old blood.

The warmth started while he was looking at the sign. It began somewhere near the base of his skull and followed along his spine until it had spread through him entirely. Then the feeling inverted and his skin went cold. The hair on his arms stood straight out. It was thrilling, ranking right up there with the rush he’d felt last night after the shooting had stopped and he’d realized he hadn’t been hit. If anything, it was better.

It was so quiet that he could hear the low hum coming from the billboard’s spotlights. Six slightly different tones combining into a curious chord. It might have been engineered to draw him closer.

He remembered television advertisements he’d seen as a kid. A Saturday-morning parade of things he’d wanted desperately and then forgotten about. He didn’t think he was going to forget about this. Of course, he had no use for perfume. He didn’t wear it, and he had no woman to give it to. But that didn’t seem to matter, because what he was feeling was far beyond desire. It was the crushing need a drowning man has for another breath.

He stepped out of the car and looked across the intersection. A flock of small birds, sparrows maybe, came swirling out of the darkness like a storm of leaves. They landed in unison on the roof of the scorched car, then turned toward him. He heard tiny claws tapping on the steel, felt a hundred pairs of black eyes watching him.

He was standing in a neighborhood that was waiting for a wrecking ball. Bulldozers had been idle on its perimeter for months. When the last condemnation orders came, they’d lower their blades and roll. The demolition teams meant to wipe away everything the thieves hadn’t already taken. They would knock down row houses and wire C-4 into century-old factories to make way for the sparkling future. He’d seen the model in City Hall. White concrete and black glass transforming the neighborhood into an autonomous shipping center. An unpopulated city from which driverless delivery trucks would glide north on pavement so smooth, their tires would barely whisper. Drones would hum upward from rooftop landing pads, packages dangling beneath them as they sped over the blocks of unlit tenements and into San Francisco. In City Hall, he’d seen no plan in the models for the residents who would be displaced. Maybe they were supposed to sell bricks.

He reached into the car and switched off the headlights, and then the street was blackout dark. The ruins around him disappeared. There was just the sign.

Finally, he let himself walk out into the intersection. He stared up at the dead actress and the perfume she’d been enlisted to sell. It wasn’t just the woman, wasn’t just the suggestion of her naked body under the sheet. It was the bottle and the lettering and the way the spotlights fell onto the black background, making something so bright out of a void. As if he’d struck a match in a mineshaft, and diamonds in the thousands came glittering back from the walls.
He couldn’t say where the peace came from, but he knew exactly what it was doing. It was cleansing him. Each swell took away a layer of darkness. In a moment he’d be bare; last night would be gone. He stood in the rain and savored that.

He only turned away when his phone rang.


 
2
He answered it in the car, wanting to be out of the sign’s reach before he spoke to anyone.

“It’s me.”

“You coming, or what?”

It didn’t matter what Jenner was saying. He could be dictating a form over the phone, or telling a kid to drop a gun. His voice never rose above dead calm. That made Jenner the kind of man people usually listened to, but the kid last night hadn’t. He hadn’t dropped his gun, either.

“I lose you, Carver?”

“Sorry ​— ​on my way.”

“Call came in and we’re up,” Jenner said. “You knew we were up again, right?”

“Sure.”

“Where are you?”

“Close to last night’s scene,” Carver said, after a pause. “There was something I wanted to see again. The call, it came just now?”

“Just now. I hung up, I called you.”

“Be out front in five. We’ll go in my car.”

“You were out there?” Jenner asked. “You got questions about last night?”

“Not about you ​— ​you did just right. Plus there’s video,” Carver said. “So don’t worry about it.”

“Okay.”

Carver could see the expressway ahead. No one had stolen the wiring up there ​— ​the commissioners and the mayor could ignore Hunter’s Point until the redevelopment was done, but not the new expressway. Its art deco streetlights glowed in a curving run toward the city center, where there was enough midnight light to make a false dawn beneath the fog.

“Tell it to me,” Carver said.

“I talked to the lieutenant first. It started with 911. Some lady called from Filbert Street. Said her neighbor’s screaming. Patrol comes, front door’s locked.”

“Okay.”

“When she tells me this, the lieutenant, she’s got the patrol guys on hold. So she patches them in, and they tell me from there,” Jenner said. “I got it straight from them. They’d knocked on the door, shouted Police, the whole thing.”

“Nobody home?”

“Nobody.”

“What time was that, they knocked? We could establish ​—”

“Jesus, Ross, you told me to tell it. I’m telling it. You want to let me?”

“Go ahead.”

“You’re throwing me off,” Jenner said. “They knock just after midnight. How do I know? They radio dispatch at 12:05. Say they’re getting out of the vehicle, going to the door. They make enough noise knocking and yelling, and after five minutes the neighbor lady comes out.”

Carver steered onto the entrance ramp. The pitted asphalt gave way to the new expressway. It was like driving on a black mirror.

“The lady tells them she’s never heard anything like it,” Jenner said. “The screams, I mean. Said he was so loud, it was like he was in the room with her.”

“She know him?”

“Ross, I don’t know. I’m telling it. I’m not leaving anything out,” Jenner said. “So, he’s screaming. Like a madman, she says. Makes her blood go cold, all that. She goes to her window, peeks through the curtain. It’s dark over there, across the street. But she sees someone in an upstairs window. He’s beating on the glass. Naked and bloody, and beating on the glass.”

“Just one guy? Not two?”

“She just sees him, the one guy. So when patrol hears this, what she saw in the window, they come off the porch and go back to the street. One of them gets the spotlight out of the vehicle, and asks her which window. She points, and they light it up. Then they see it.”

For the second time that night, Carver felt his skin tighten, felt his hairs stand up.

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