Montezuma Strip by Alan Dean Foster is $3 at Amazon US. The sequel/companion book
The Mocking Program is $2.
Science fiction that imagines a megalopolis along the US/Mexico border and the clashes that result.
Montezuma Strip
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Detective Angel Cardenas polices the crime-ridden US-Mexico borderlands in five futuristic stories from the New York Times–bestselling author.
A century in the future, greed flourishes on the Montezuma Strip, a string of high-tech that follows the old and frayed USA-Mexico border stretching from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico. First World technology meets Third World cheap labor, while both the rich and the poor fall into the widening chasm between them. In five stories set among the chaos, Tex-Mex cop Angel Cardenas puts his intuit ability to good use as a living lie-detector.
After being blinded on the job and then having his sight restored with an optic nerve transplant, Cardenas uses his heightened intuition to get to the truth, whether it’s figuring out how two genius software designers were killed—with no visible causes of death—in “Sanctuary” or stopping a deadly heavenly vision (that could be a military-ware tactile projection) in “Our Lady of the Machine.”
In three more stories—“Heartwired,” “Gagrito,” and “Hellado”—Cardenas learns that in a land where everything and everyone can be bought and sold, even justice has a price.
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The Mocking Program
Quote:
“High tech, murder, and intuition set the fast pace in a thriller” of a detective story set in a futuristic world from the New York Times–bestselling author (USA Today).
Located in the Namerican Southwest, the Montezuma Strip is the Western hemisphere’s largest concentration of industry, commerce, assemblage, cutting-edge technology—and trouble. So it’s no surprise to Insp. Angel Cardenas that there’s been yet another murder. What is surprising is the victim: an apparently well-off man with a clean ID. Well, two clean IDs . . .
Trying to nail down the man’s real identity takes Cardenas and his partner to a good side of town, where a woman—living as his wife —and her daughter reside. But that gets them nowhere, especially when they barely escape the high-tech security system that blows up the house and everything in it.
Relying on his intuit abilities, Cardenas learns that the woman was on the run from Katla’s father, a nasty felon with a long rap sheet. Going rogue, Cardenas follows their tracks from the gritty urban underworld of Quetzal to a lush primate paradise in Costa Rica. Because what twelve-year-old Katla knows—what she is—makes her the target of not just her father, but a host of others willing to kill to possess her . . .
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