COMING FROM PALIMPSEST PRESS IN EARLY 2027.
On the fringe of the Remaining States of America, down-at-heel Boston PI Arbert Smif struggles to come to terms with his dishonourable discharge from the Papal Army and with the brutal disciplinary process—the Dante-inspired Purgatorio—that preceded it. When Saskatchewan-based multinational Cortical Gleam Biomechanical Systems hires him to discreetly look into the disappearance of some prototype tech from its Massachusetts testing facility, his life seems to be looking up. Especially when they upgrade his own implants.
But as he tracks the missing tech—from the office towers of the Boston Islands to a white supremacist camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains to a salvaged and rebuilt New Orleans in the Texas-Louisiana Commonwealth—he realizes certain things aren’t adding up. If Cortical Gleam needs his anonymity, why saddle him with a corporate minder? Why keep him in the dark about the presumed culprit? And why does that Jesuit keep following him?