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Forests of the Night | Rating | |
| A | |||
| S. Andrew Swann | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| The Moreau Series | Forests of the Night, Emperors of Twilight, Specters of the Dawn, Fearful Symmetry, Profiteer, Partisian, Revolutionary | ||
Nohar Rajasthan isn't your ordinary private investigator. He's a second-generation moreau, a tiger genetically modified with human DNA to think and talk and walk upright. Tigers aren't the only animals to be modified like this. Rabbits, rats, bears, foxes, dogs and a few others all got the same treatment, all designed to be soldiers. But now the wars are over, and while the American 29th Amendment gives moreaus the same rights as humans officially, in reality they are a definite underclass, relegated to concentrated slums and looked down upon by everyone.
Nohar is like other private investigators, though, in most other respects. He's down on his luck, broke, and rent is due. He needs a case badly, and one comes along. A most peculiar frank - short for frankenstein, a modified human instead of a modified animal - offers an outrageous sum of money to find out if his corporation is responsible for the recent killing of a senator's campaign manager. And like most mystery novels, what Nohar begins to uncover is much, much larger than it initially appears to be.
The book is enjoyable on a great many fronts. First and foremost, I found it a great mystery novel. The clues are consistent and they fit together, but Swann arranges them in such an order that new readers will probably be kept wondering for quite a ways through the book. Secondly, the setting is wonderful. There is no doubt whatsoever that this is the future, as opposed to today plus talking tigers and the like. All-in-one coms and aircars are the only significant additions technologically, but Swann goes beyond most near-future novels by having the world political situation drastically altered. Those wars were not small affairs, and they had long-reaching effects.
I also enjoyed the characters. Nohar is physically one of the most powerful moreaus out there, but even a tiger has his limits and faults. Some of the phyiscal downsides of being a tiger are carried over as well as the teeth and claws and muscles. This is less true for other species - or perhaps it only seems that way because we don't see things from their viewpoint. The book is in third-person, but it follows Nohar and Nohar only.
This is a thoroughly enjoyable sci-fi mystery. It's more than heavy on the topic of discrimination and human rights, but it manages never to become actually preachy. Still, some people might get rather annoyed by the main thrust of the book's theme. But for myself, I found it wonderful and in many ways even realistic. And I can almost guarantee that most readers will be surprised by the solution when Nohar finally unravels the mystery of who is doing what and why. I strongly recommend this book both to mystery lovers and science-fiction enthusiasts.
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