The Night Market

by Jonathan Moore

From an author who consistently gives us “suspense that never stops” (James Patterson), a near-future thriller that makes your most paranoid fantasies seem like child’s play.

  • Format: eBook
  • ISBN-13/ EAN: 9780544931855
  • ISBN-10: 0544931858
  • Pages: 272
  • Publication Date: 01/16/2018
  • Carton Quantity: 1
About the Book
About the Author
Excerpts
Reviews
  • About the Book
    “The book’s tone is Chandleresque, the conspiracy worrying Carver and Jenner expands to Pynchonian proportions, and the physical ick they encounter might have oozed out of a Cronenberg movie.”—Washington Post 

      

    “It’s Miami Vice meets The Matrix, and George Orwell is hosting the party.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 

      

    It’s late Thursday and Inspector Ross Carver is at a crime scene: a dead man covered in an unknown substance that’s eating through his skin. Suddenly, six FBI agents burst in and haul Carver outside and into a disinfectant trailer, where he’s shocked unconscious. On Sunday he wakes up in his own bed, his neighbor Mia—who he’s barely spoken to—by his side. He can’t remember the past three days. Mia says police officers brought him home and told her he’d been poisoned. Carver can’t disprove her, but his gut says to keep her close. 

                A mind-bending, masterfully plotted thriller—“like Blade Runner if it were written by Charles de Lint or Neil Gaiman”*—The Night Market follows Carver as he works to find out what happened to him, soon realizing he’s entangled in a massive web of conspiracy. And that Mia knows a lot more than she lets on. 

      

    “Mystery and thriller readers will find much to love here, but fans of science fiction also should embrace this incredible work.”—Bookreporter 

      

    *Publishers Weekly, starred review 

     

  • About the Author
  • Excerpts
    1 

     

    Carver pulled to the curb behind the chassis of a burned-out car. 

     

    Across the intersection was the billboard, six spotlights along the bottom. They shined upward, lighting the sign, throwing its shadow across the vacant building behind it. The rest of the neighborhood was dead. A moonscape of abandoned warehouses, everything picked over twice. Walls punched in with crowbars, wires and plumbing stripped out. Even the streetlights were gone; in Bay View and Hunter’s Point, copper was worth more than light. Kids were creeping in from the edges to steal bricks now. They could take them by the bucketload to the salvage yards south of town and trade them for day-old bread. He knew about that from last night. 

     

    But no one had touched the sign. Maybe it made them feel better, having it lit. He turned on the windshield wipers so he could see it clearly. He thought about getting out of the car. He’d be able to see all of it if he walked to the middle of the intersection. He’d almost done that last night, too, when he’d been lost in the dark, driving back from the scene. Shaking still, from the gunfire. Tonight he’d driven this way just to see it again. He didn’t have any business here. No one did. 

     

    The sign was brand new, but he couldn’t imagine who would have put it here. A place like this? They might as well have buried it in the desert. 

     

    It was selling perfume, a fragrance called Black Aria. The woman in the ad was an actress. He knew her face but not her name. His grandfather might have known. Elizabeth something? Or Audrey, maybe. She lay on her stomach, her chin propped in her hands. Her knees were bent so that her bare toes pointed straight up. She was surely nude underneath the black sheet that was draped over her, covering no more than it had to. Sheet or not, every curve was there, defined in bare skin or beneath the indents and contours of satin. 

     

    It was all digitized, of course. Just another seamless fake. The real Elizabeth, or Audrey, wouldn’t have posed like this. Not back then, whenever she was alive, and not to sell perfume. People used to have standards. But those were gone now and they weren’t coming back. Like the burned-out car, like the whole of Hunter’s Point. The bottle hovered above her bare shoulder blades, the crystal vial so thick it looked like ice. The liquid inside was the color of old blood. 

     

    The warmth started while he was looking at the sign. It began somewhere near the base of his skull and followed along his spine until it had spread through him entirely. Then the feeling inverted and his skin went cold. The hair on his arms stood straight out. It was thrilling, ranking right up there with the rush he’d felt last night after the shooting had stopped and he’d realized he hadn’t been hit. If anything, it was better. 

     

    It was so quiet that he could hear the low hum coming from the billboard’s spotlights. Six slightly different tones combining into a curious chord. It might have been engineered to draw him closer. 

     

    He remembered television advertisements he’d seen as a kid. A Saturday-morning parade of things he’d wanted desperately and then forgotten about. He didn’t think he was going to forget about this. Of course, he had no use for perfume. He didn’t wear it, and he had no woman to give it to. But that didn’t seem to matter, because what he was feeling was far beyond desire. It was the crushing need a drowning man has for another breath. 

     

    He stepped out of the car and looked across the intersection. A flock of small birds, sparrows maybe, came swirling out of the darkness like a storm of leaves. They landed in unison on the roof of the scorched car, then turned toward him. He heard tiny claws tapping on the steel, felt a hundred pairs of black eyes watching him. 

     

    He was standing in a neighborhood that was waiting for a wrecking ball. Bulldozers had been idle on its perimeter for months. When the last condemnation orders came, they’d lower their blades and roll. The demolition teams meant to wipe away everything the thieves hadn’t already taken. They would knock down row houses and wire C-4 into century-old factories to make way for the sparkling future. He’d seen the model in City Hall. White concrete and black glass transforming the neighborhood into an autonomous shipping center. An unpopulated city from which driverless delivery trucks would glide north on pavement so smooth, their tires would barely whisper. Drones would hum upward from rooftop landing pads, packages dangling beneath them as they sped over the blocks of unlit tenements and into San Francisco. In City Hall, he’d seen no plan in the models for the residents who would be displaced. Maybe they were supposed to sell bricks. 

     

    He reached into the car and switched off the headlights, and then the street was blackout dark. The ruins around him disappeared. There was just the sign. 

     

    Finally, he let himself walk out into the intersection. He stared up at the dead actress and the perfume she’d been enlisted to sell. It wasn’t just the woman, wasn’t just the suggestion of her naked body under the sheet. It was the bottle and the lettering and the way the spotlights fell onto the black background, making something so bright out of a void. As if he’d struck a match in a mineshaft, and diamonds in the thousands came glittering back from the walls. 

    He couldn’t say where the peace came from, but he knew exactly what it was doing. It was cleansing him. Each swell took away a layer of darkness. In a moment he’d be bare; last night would be gone. He stood in the rain and savored that. 

     

    He only turned away when his phone rang. 

     

     

     

    2
     

    He answered it in the car, wanting to be out of the sign’s reach before he spoke to anyone. 

     

    “It’s me.” 

     

    “You coming, or what?” 

     

    It didn’t matter what Jenner was saying. He could be dictating a form over the phone, or telling a kid to drop a gun. His voice never rose above dead calm. That made Jenner the kind of man people usually listened to, but the kid last night hadn’t. He hadn’t dropped his gun, either. 

     

    “I lose you, Carver?” 

     

    “Sorry ?— ?on my way.” 

     

    “Call came in and we’re up,” Jenner said. “You knew we were up again, right?” 

     

    “Sure.” 

     

    “Where are you?” 

     

    “Close to last night’s scene,” Carver said, after a pause. “There was something I wanted to see again. The call, it came just now?” 

     

    “Just now. I hung up, I called you.” 

     

    “Be out front in five. We’ll go in my car.” 

     

    “You were out there?” Jenner asked. “You got questions about last night?” 

     

    “Not about you ?— ?you did just right. Plus there’s video,” Carver said. “So don’t worry about it.” 

     

    “Okay.” 

     

    Carver could see the expressway ahead. No one had stolen the wiring up there ?— ?the commissioners and the mayor could ignore Hunter’s Point until the redevelopment was done, but not the new expressway. Its art de...

  • Reviews
    Praise for The Night Market 

    Named an Exciting Mystery/Thriller of Winter 2018 by Bookish 

    Named a Best Mystery of 2018 by Maxim Jakuboswki, CrimeTime 

     

    “A grim and gripping tale of well-earned paranoia…Moore, an attorney, uses his tight-lipped prose to fine effect…I’ll wager, ‘The Night Market’ and its predecessors, ‘The Poison Artist’ and ‘The Dark Room,’ are like nothing you’ve ever read. In his acknowledgments, Moore sums up the novels as ‘a three-panel painting of San Francisco.’ As done, he might have added, by Hieronymus Bosch.” —Washington Post 

     

    "A sharp and scary near-future thriller that delivers a dark message about society's love affair with technology...Unsettling, stylish noir...[The] utterly shocking revelations in the third act are the stuff of nightmares. You'll never look at a flock of sparrows the same way again." —Kirkus Reviews, starred review 

     

    "Outstanding...Moore smoothly fills Carver’s quest for the truth with equal parts hidden menace and outright strangeness. This mystery feels like Blade Runner as if it were written by Charles De Lint or Neil Gaiman." —Publishers Weekly, starredreview 

     

    "A futuristic conspiracy with horrifying implications...Thought-provoking." —Booklist 

     

    "What a talent this author has for creating setting and atmosphere...Clever, unique, and unpredictable." —A Book and a Cup of Tea 

     

    "[Moore] has a knack for evoking the stuff of nightmares which has me hooked from the first page." —Maxim JakubowskiCrimeTime 

     

    Praise for Jonathan Moore's The Dark Room 

    A Library Journal "Essential Thriller" of January 2017 

    An iBooks Best Book of January 2017 

    A Northern Virginia Magazine Best New Release of January 2017 

     

    “Moore channels the moody intensity of Raymond Chandler’s crime fiction and saturates The Dark Room with the brooding cinematic qualities of the mid-20th century’s black-and-white film noir genre...The Dark Room will prompt readers unfamiliar with Moore to seek out his other works, including The Poison Artist, which Stephen King describes as electrifying.” —Washington Post  

     

    “Smart plotting. Nary a false note. Suspense that never stops. If you like Michael Connelly’s novels, you will gobble up Jonathan Moore’s The Dark Room.” —James Patterson   

     

    "Complex, well-crafted thriller... Moore—an attorney and author of three previous novels, including The Poison Artist and Redheads, which was short-listed for the Bram Stoker Award—infuses the complicated tale with richly detailed forensic facts and procedural expertise that would make [Kathy] Reichs proud. At the same time, he makes a concerted effort to craft characters you can care about." —BookPage 

     

    "An engaging and thoroughly contemporary mystery...The Dark Room is a worthy introduction to Moore’s work, and will soon have you seeking out his earlier titles (like The Poison Artist or Redheads) while waiting for his next crime novel." —Bookgasm  

     

    "Exuding noirish elements and utilizing the city’s mean streets to their full, atmospheric effect, The Dark Room oozes dastardly deeds from blackmail to murder—and beyond." Seattle Review of Books 

     

    "The Dark Room is a complex, edgy, elegant novel that is at once macabre, menacing, and mesmerizing. Moore calls this book “the center panel in a triptych” that started with The Poison Artist. The third, The Night Market, is scheduled for 2018. I can’t wait." —Open Letters Monthly 

     

    "The Dark Room is one of those books that when you think you know what happened, it veers directions and plunges into another stream of questions and doubt...[it] will lure you in from the first chapter and then capture your attention until the very last page....a great crime novel that I won’t forget anytime soon." —Latte Nights Reviews 

     

    "Complex and often deeply disturbing crime noir...Moody and macabre with an Edgar Allan Poe feel to it, this book leaves an uncomfortable, indelible impression that can't be shaken by simply putting it down. The featureless Cain and his search for the woman in the casket are irresistible. San Francisco has never been so menacing." —Kirkus Reviews, starred review 

     

    "Moore calls this book 'the center panel in a triptych' that started with The Poison Artist. With this second electrifying noir thriller, readers won’t want to wait until 2018, when the third, The Night Market, is scheduled for publication." —Booklist, starred review  

     

    "Intricate thriller... Moore, a terrific stylist, provides telling procedural details (a computer-expert friend helps identify the clothing and jewelry in the decades-old photos) and makes good use of the Bay Area setting." —Publishers Weekly  

     

    Selected Praise for The Poison Artist 

    The Poison Artist is an electrifying read, building from shock to shock. I read the last one hundred pages in a single sitting. The final chapter is an absolute stunner. I haven’t read anything so terrifying since Red Dragon.”  —Stephen King 

     

    “Patient, stylish, and incredibly suspenseful.” —Lee Child 

     

    “A magnificent, thoroughly unnerving psychological thriller written in a lush, intoxicating style. I dare you to look away." —Justin Cronin 

      

    "The Poison Artist is a rare thing: a totally new take on the mystery-thriller genre...Jonathan Moore's story of a scientist helping the police investigate a femme fatale serial killer using poison is totally fresh and unpredictable. The writing is top-notch, wonderfully evoking a dark and foggy San Francisco where ghosts of the past color the bloody events of the day. Grade: A." —Cleveland Plain Dealer 

     

    "The Poison Artist takes place in a fog-bound, rain-drenched version of San Francisco, which becomes, in Moore’s telling, almost a city from a dream, where truths and realities slip in and out of focus somewhere between the long nights and the constantly filled glasses...It’s genuinely scary, in the very best way, and nastily twisty, also in the very best way. Just like the clashes between Caleb’s day and night existences, Moore’s hypnotic, rich prose shifts and jars from seductive bars at night to the gruesome way fingerprints have to be taken from a body that has been underwater for days. Spiralling down from dream into nightmare, The Poison Artist is thoroughly unnerving and classily executed."Guardian 

      

    “Moore has a great gift for the macabre and creepy.” —Time...

×