Please enjoy my new Brooklyn Rail book review. Rivers of Gold is a tech noir novel set in New York City 5 minutes from now. It’s got all the elements that the genre requires — girls, guns, drugs, noir, and lots of tech — but unless you’re a 14 year old straight boy, you can probably skip it.
Not quite a detective story, Adam Dunn’s tech-noir novel lives up to its front-cover claim that it’s “a mile a minute” page-turner. Set in New York City in the year 2013, in which the five boroughs have been reduced to one giant South Bronx circa 1975, our chief docent is a hipster named Renny. An up-and-coming photographer, Renny uses his career to gain entrée to the city’s thriving underground nightclubs, or “speaks”—short for speakeasies—so he can deal Ecstasy to the city’s steadily dwindling number of affluent Beautiful People.
On the streets, violent crime is rampant despite a pervasive surveillance culture propagated as much by NYPD’s street cams as by anyone with a MY FULL REVIEW CONT’D AT BROOKLYN RAIL>>