More About Finch...

THE CITYAlmost two hundred years after the events chronicled in Shriek: An Afterword, Duncan Shriek's worst prophecies have come to pass. The gray caps, mysterious underground inhabitants, have Risen and conquered the city for their own arcane purposes. Ambergris is an occupied city and a failed state, its citizens oppressed and its streets riddled through with spies from other sovereignties.The River Moth has been diverted into a huge artificial bay, in the middle of which the gray caps are building two strange towers between which the sky sometimes flickers and changes. The remnants of the human resistance, the armies of House Hoegbotton and House Frankwrithe, and their tanks and dirigibles have been missing for five years, having retreated to the northern shore, only to disappear into a fungal hell called the HFZ. To the south: concentration camps and a thick pall of smoke. In the middle, a trapped population controlled by fear, repression, addiction to fungal drugs, and food control, all given the trappings of normalcy in the form of a human-led, overworked police force pledged to keep an uneasy peace. Every citizen wonders three things:What will happen when the towers are completed?When will discontent turn into open rebellion?Will the rebel forces ever return?THE DETECTIVEThirty-five-year-old John Finch, conscripted into the gray caps' police force as a detective, spends most of his days responding to domestic disturbances, suicides, and missing person reports. Supervised by the gray cap Finch has nicknamed "Heretic," he lives in fear that his superiors will find out that he once actively fought against the gray caps' Rising.His wife dead, he lives in an apartment on the seventh floor of a rotting old luxury hotel with water in the basement, alone except for a cat named Feral, a lizard named Sidle, and occasional visits from his mysterious lover Sintra, who only comes to him at night. Holding on to the traditions started by his grandfather, he keeps a secret journal of his life as way of trying to make sense of the changes to the city and his life.Trapped by his job and the city, Finch is about to come to face to face with a series of mysteries that will change him and Ambergris forever.The cat is transforming itself into something else. The lizard watches intently.They both want to know: who is Finch, really?