📚 Finished reading Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway.

Sci-fi detective noir, what’s not to love in this genre? It’s set in a world where a very few, very rich, contingent of people have managed to get themselves treated with a new genetic therapy called T7. You know, exactly the kind of thing our current tech billionaires would hoard and indulge in if they knew how to.

Taking that drug, whilst in the short term being a painful experience, essentially resets your physical system to something like your teenage years. You de-age, become healthier, bigger, stronger and so on. You might be 70 years old in chronological terms, but appear and feel like a giant, even God-like, 40 year old. The owner of the company that makes this stuff, Ste­fan Tonfamecasca, has had a few doses and grown to almost 4 metres tall with an equivalently boosted all-round stature.

In short, the patients who use this therapy become Titans.

Cal Sounder, on the other hand - a standard human - is an independent detective who specialises in consulting on sensitive cases that the police don’t really want to touch. These include cases involving Titans, a subject area that the conventional police are loathe to dig into too deeply not least due to the power structures involved.

Imagine Sounder’s surprise then when he shows up to a supposedly mundane murder scene, as far as that sort of thing could exist, where the victim appeared at first to be a fairly poor, beleaguered, very shy professor. Of course it turns out that the professor was in fact a Titan. But how on earth did such an atypical guy become a Titan? And who could possibly have killed such a giant? Titans, with all their privileges and protections, do not typically end up as murder victims.

That’s for Cal, and the reader, to figure out.