Description:
Technology has raised the dead, but their new lease on life isn't all it's cracked up to be, in the first book of this cozy cyber-noir duology.
Hildy Doval is dead--and still unemployed . . .
Humanity wasn't quite ready for immortality, even in 3025. Ever since the Flicker/Helix company "cured" death with technologically advanced holographic hardware, flicker ghosts have been secondary citizens, lacking purpose and agency.
Spending her afterlife in a boarding house in Hypatia City, Hildy is the least-requested flicker-ghost at Carlotta Sun's Purgatory House for Spectral Services. At Carlotta Sun's, Hildy competes daily for ghost gigs against her more marketable housemates: the flighty musician Eyvind, desperate to compose the masterpiece he never got to in life, and Anjali, an imperious silent-film extra whose single surviving motion picture shot her to post-mortem stardom despite it being based on a lie.
Meanwhile, a shadowy, headless ghost called the Graverobber has been spotted emerging from holographic billboards, snatching the resurrected from their so-called lives and sowing chaos throughout the city. When one of their fellow boarders goes missing, Hildy and her friends find themselves at the center of a highly publicized mystery. With only two months to go before a crucial election that'll decide the future of all specters, they must determine who the Graverobber is―and, more importantly, where they belong in this dead new world.
Review Quotes:
"I was just obsessed with everyone in Dead New World as soon as they arrived on the page--there's no other writer whose characters I've fallen so instantly in love with. I devoured this book and was delighted by every moment of it." --Hari Conner, author of I Shall Never Fall in Love