The Night Market by Jonathan Moore
Monday, February 19, 2018 at 8:45AM 
Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on January 16, 2018
The Night Market is a near-future science fiction thriller. Many thrillers that are based on wide-scale conspiracies tax the reader’s ability to suspend disbelief, but readers are conditioned to suspend disbelief when they read science fiction, so the conspiracy seems plausible. In fact, given the rampant nature of consumerism and the ease with which corporations place profit over moral behavior, the conspiracy would be all too likely if the technology upon which it depends actually existed.
The near future in which the story is set is not a nice place. Big chunks of urban areas belong to vandals at night. Police brutality is unchecked. Isolation is a way of life. Consumerism is the new heroin.
Ross Carver is a police inspector in San Francisco. He and his partner, Cleveland Jenner, investigate a report that a blood-covered guy inside a house is beating a bedroom window. A few minutes after the report is made, the man had turned into a pile of cooked meat. By the time Carver and Jenner arrive, the dead man is a pile of moss. A few minutes later, the feds have Carver and Jenner in decontamination and are burning down the dead man’s house. And after that, they don’t remember a thing. In fact, they don’t remember responding to the call.
Before their memories disappeared, Carver and Jenner were investigating Patrick Wong, who has now disappeared. Jenner thinks he interviewed Wong, although he doesn’t recall the details. They wanted to talk to Patrick Wong so they could find Johnnie Wong, who may have murdered a singer named Hadley Hardgrave. The story eventually circles back to that murder.
Carver gets an assist from a neighbor named Mia who appears to be agoraphobic, but Carver, and thus the reader, doesn’t know whether anything about Mia can be trusted. Such is the nature of conspiracy novels. In fact, part of the fun of a conspiracy novel is guessing which characters are part of the conspiracy. In The Night Market, puzzling out how the conspiracy works is also part of the fun.
The ending of The Night Market is surprising. It’s also surprisingly creepy. The novel as a whole is sufficiently convincing to be chilling, while Jonathan Moore’s crisp prose style creates a dark blend of uncertainty and suspense. You don’t need to be a science fiction fan to enjoy this near-future thriller; it’s like a Ludlum novel with fewer words, stripped to its bare essentials.
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