(pb;
1966, a.k.a. Murder on the 31st Floor. First book in the
Inspector Jensen duology.)
From
the back cover
“In a
chill Northern country, the welfare state has crushed the population’s spirit,
eradicated its individuality. Rebellion is unknown. Suddenly, a tremor of
unfamiliar terror is felt when a bomb is announced to explode in the skyscraper
office of a powerful, mind-polluting publisher. Chief Inspector Jensen is
directed to apprehend the terrorist within a week. Following a series of
misleading trails and false confessions, he, himself, is forced to become a
cold-blooded murderer. His crime reveals the truth about the thirty-first
floor.”
Review
Thirty-First
reads
like George Orwell’s 1984 structured as a police procedural, with prose
that is as bareboned as Richard Stark’s twenty-four-book Parker series. Its
protagonist, Chief Inspector Jensen is a cipher─unemotional, hyper-focused and
efficient as a robot─as he investigates a bomb threat to an influential and groupthink-pushing
publishing company. Every suspect he talks to brings him closer to disturbing
truths that shatter up his automaton-like existence, even as the deadline for
his investigation wrap-up looms closer and closer. All of these elements─sketched-out
characters, waste-no-words writing, fast pacing, etc., slowly ratchet up the tension
to a stunning end-line that made me want to re-read Thirty-First in the
near future, with the knowledge gleaned from having read it before. This is a
great, chilling and classic (in the good sense, not just older) read, one of
the few books that I intend to keep in my collection.
Followed
by The Steel Spring.
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