The New York City of Warren Ellis's Gun Machine is roughly recognizable as our own, in a "20 minutes into the future" sort of way. And, like the urban landscapes of Ellis's comic book series Transmetropolitan and Fell, it's a profoundly disturbing place. Detective John Tallow learns that the hard way: after taking down the lunatic who killed his partner in a shootout in a downtown apartment building, Tallow stumbles onto a locked room full of guns--"rippling patterns of gunmetal, from floor to ceiling"--and each one proves to be connected to an unsolved murder, some of them stretching back decades. For his troubles, Tallow is told to work the case, which soon becomes even weirder than it appears.
Ellis has all the police story moves from literature and TV down cold, so much so that it's hard not to see a subtle but affectionate mockery in their perfect execution. (Not too affectionate, though: As one of the crime scene unit technicians assigned to work with Tallow puts it, "I hunt and build and solve things with science. You know what a New York City cop does? Beats protestors. Rapes women.") The plot leans a little heavily on coincidence to be realistic, but you don't read Warren Ellis for realism. You read him because he's a master at folding strange corners of the universe into one meeting point, and building a compelling story around them. Gun Machine is one of his most accessible examples yet. --Ron Hogan, founder of Beatrice.com