Titanium Noir (Nick Harkaway)

Titanium Noir
Nick Harkaway
Knopf
Fiction, Mystery/Sci-Fi/Thriller
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Cal Sounder is a private detective specializing in incidents involving the Titans: medically-enhanced elites who can potentially live forever. They are the richest of the rich, the most powerful of the powerful, literally larger than life thanks to the growth effects of the drugs involved, and their crimes are as outsized as their lifestyles... so when one of them turns up dead under very suspicious circumstances, the case could blow the roof off the city.
Roddy Tebbit was atypical even for a Titan, a modest techie working as a professor and pursuing private research into lake algae. Who would want an inoffensive milquetoast of a man like that dead? The more Cal investigates, the more doesn't make sense, leading him down a long and twisted path into deadly secrets long buried by the most powerful Titan on the planet.

REVIEW: A jaded investigator of gray morality, an untouchable elite, a criminal underworld at least as powerful as the ostensible government... Titanium Noir isn't the first science fiction story to transplant the guts of a noir thriller into a dystopian future, but it does so with confidence and a nice conceit in the Titan treatments and its consequences, creating what is essentially another species with godlike aspirations.
Though an ordinary human, Cal has a unique position in the city as a liaison between the Titans and the normal population: his girlfriend Athena is the daughter of the most powerful Titan in the city (and arguably the world), who wound up turning Titan herself after a horrific accident... a transformation that has inevitably driven a wedge between the pair. To become a Titan is to outgrow one's old self (literally; each life-extending, rejuvenating dose causes fresh growth, so they physically tower over the populace and even their voices can cause physical harm), and many become increasingly divorced from their humanity and from the consequences of their own actions. Even as Cal resents the Titans who essentially rule in the way oligarchs do - not with official titles or offices but through money and power and holding the keys to fame, fortune, and immortality - he has fallen into the role as their defender and protector on some level. This is a fence he will not be able to straddle indefinitely; Athena beckons from the Titan side, while his vestigial conscious and outsized awareness of how inhuman they become, how even love seems to fade among them after a few decades or pesky human lifetimes, pull him toward humanity. The case of Roddy's murder plunges Cal deeper into Titan secrets and deceptions than even he could imagine, making him few new friends and many new enemies. In noir fashion, Cal finds corruption behind nearly every doorway in a case that inevitably zigs just when he anticipates a zag. Around him, the future city he inhabits is revealed, a world with some progress but also mired in the past, in no small part due to the essential-immortals pulling civilization's strings; if they can't change, why should the world?
It lost a half-star for an ending that felt a bit rushed (and a conclusion that left a slight aftertaste I didn't quite like... one that I'm sure was intentional, but it being intentional didn't keep me from not quite enjoying it). Overall, though, it's a decent blend of genres with an interesting examination of how immortality and elitism create a subspecies almost literally divorced from the main body of the human race.

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