Awakenings by Edward Lazellari

Last month, Tor.com posted an excerpt from Awakenings, the exciting debut novel by Edward Lazellari. That post fell smack in the middle of that site’s Noir-themed week, so maybe it’s not surprising that the excerpt was the novel’s prologue, which introduces Colby, a down-on-his-luck private investigator who gets contracted by some shady — and, as soon becomes clear, truly terrifying — characters to track down a list of people for unknown purposes.

However, the noir-ish tone of that excerpt may be a bit deceptive, as Awakenings takes a completely different turn after that prologue, mostly focusing on different characters, broadening the scope of the story by a few orders of magnitude, and losing much (if not a... Read More