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The Last Policeman: A Novel (The Last Policeman Trilogy) Paperback – May 13, 2013

by Ben H. Winters (Author)

4,356

Book 1 of 3: Last Policeman Trilogy

Editors' pick Best Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

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Edgar AwardWinner, 2013

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As Seen on Today with Hoda & Jenna

“A genre-defying blend of crime writing and science fiction.” –Alexandra Alter, The New York Times

Winner of the 2013 Edgar® Award for Best Paperback Original!

What’s the point in solving murders if we’re all going to die soon, anyway?

Detective Hank Palace has faced this question ever since asteroid 2011GV1 hovered into view. There’s no chance left. No hope. Just six precious months until impact.

The economy spirals downward while crops rot in the fields. Churches and synagogues are packed. People all over the world are walking off the job—but not Hank Palace. He’s investigating a death by hanging in a city that sees a dozen suicides every week—except this one feels suspicious, and Palace is the only cop who cares.

The first in a trilogy, The Last Policeman offers a mystery set on the brink of an apocalypse. As Palace’s investigation plays out under the shadow of 2011GV1, we’re confronted by hard questions way beyond “whodunit.” What basis does civilization rest upon? What is life worth? What would any of us do, what would we really do, if our days were numbered?

Book 1 of 3

Last Policeman Trilogy
Print length

336 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Quirk Books
Publication date

May 13, 2013
Dimensions

5.21 x 0.85 x 8.01 inches
ISBN-10

9781594746741
ISBN-13

978-1594746741
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Popular Highlights in this book

What are popular highlights?

The end of the world changes everything, from a law-enforcement perspective.
Highlighted by 448 Kindle readers
People’s inability to face up to this thing is worse than the thing, it really is.
Highlighted by 297 Kindle readers
The perseverance in this world, despite it all, of things done right.
Highlighted by 126 Kindle readers

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

Winner of the 2013 Edgar® Award for Best Paperback Original
One of Slate’s Best Books of 2012
A July 2012 Indie Next List Pick

“It’s funny, it’s thrilling, it’s crazy, it’s interesting.”—Jenna Bush Hager, TODAY with Hoda & Jenna

“Winters’s apocalyptic detective story contains an earth-shattering element of science fiction that lifts it beyond a typical procedural.”—New York Times Book Review

“An appealing hybrid of the best of science fiction and crime fiction.”—The Washington Post

"[The] weird, beautiful, unapologetically apocalyptic Last Policeman trilogy is one of my favorite mystery series."—John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars and Paper Towns

“In his acclaimed Last Policeman trilogy, Winters showed off his mastery of edgy, sardonic wit — there’s nothing like an asteroid speeding toward Earth to bring out the black humor in people.”—Newsday

“Sharp, funny, and deeply wise.”—Slate.com

“Darkly intriguing.”—Discover

“I’m in the middle of it and can’t put the dang thing down.”—USA Today’s Pop Candy

“Exhilarating.”—E! Online

“Ben Winters makes noir mystery even darker: his latest novel sets a despondent detective on a suspicious suicide case—while an asteroid hurtles toward earth.”—Wired.com

“Winters’s writing is funny, surprisingly tender, and thoroughly human.”—Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine

“A sturdy, functional, entertaining page-turner.”—Greg Cook, WBUR.org

“I’m eager to read the other books, and expect that they’ll keep me as enthralled as the first one did.”—Mark Frauenfedler, Boing Boing

“The Last Policeman is extraordinary—as well as brilliant, surprising, and, considering the circumstances, oddly uplifting.”—Mystery Scene

“Full of compelling twists, likable characters, and a sad beauty, The Last Policeman is a gem.”—San Francisco Book Review

“This is a book that asks big questions about civilization, community, desperation and hope.”—io9

“In his Last Policeman trilogy, for which he won both the Edgar Award and the Philip K. Dick Award, Winters took a standard science fiction trope — the final months before an asteroid slams into Earth — and mixed it with some of the conventions of the detective novel, imbuing his apocalyptic scenario with an extra measure of urgency and poignancy.”—The San Francisco Chronicle

“The Last Policeman succeeds both as a mystery, with a quirky detective and an intriguing whodunit, and as a piece of apocalyptic speculative fiction.”—Sacramento News & Review

“Resonant and powerful.”—Locus

“A promising kickoff to a planned trilogy. For Winters, the beauty is in the details rather than the plot’s grim main thrust.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

About the Author

Ben H. Winters is the New York Times best-selling, Edgar Award–winning, and Philip K. Dick Award–winning author of The Quiet Boy, Golden State, Underground Airlines, the Last Policeman trilogy, and the mash-up novel Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. Ben has also worked extensively in television; he was a writer on the FX cult hit Legion as well as Manhunt on Apple TV+, and he is the creator of the CBS drama Tracker. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, three kids, and one large dog.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I’m staring at the insurance man and he’s staring at me, two cold gray eyes behind old-fashioned tortoiseshell frames, and I’m having this awful and inspiring feeling, like holy moly this is real, and I don’t know if I’m ready, I really don’t.
I narrow my eyes and I steady myself and I take him in again, shift on my haunches to get a closer look. The eyes and the glasses, the weak chin and the receding hairline, the thin black belt tied and tightened beneath the chin.
This is real. Is it? I don’t know.
I take a deep breath, demanding of myself that I focus, block out everything but the corpse, block out the grimy floors and the tinny rock-and-roll Muzak from the cheap speakers in the ceiling.
The smell is killing me, a pervasive and deeply unpleasant odor, like a horse barn that’s been splashed with French-fry grease. There are any number of jobs in this world still being efficiently and diligently accomplished, but the late-night cleaning of twentypoliceman four-hour fast-food-restaurant bathrooms is not among them. Case in point: the insurance man had been slumped over in here, lodged between the toilet and the dull green wall of the stall, for several hours before Officer Michelson happened to come in, needing to use the john, and discovered him.
Michelson called it in as a 10-54S, of course, which is what it looks like. One thing I’ve learned in the last few months, one thing we’ve all learned, is that suicides-by-hanging rarely end up dangling from a light fixture or a roof beam, like in the movies. If they’re serious, and nowadays everybody is serious, would-be suicides fasten themselves to a doorknob, or to a coat hook, or, as the insurance man appears to have done, to a horizontal rail, like the grab bar in a handicapped stall. And then they just lean forward, let their weight do the work, tighten the knot, seal the airway.
I angle farther forward, readjust my crouch, trying to find a way to share space comfortably with the insurance man without falling or getting my fingerprints all over the scene. I’ve had nine of these in the three and a half months since I became a detective, and still I can’t get used to it, to what death by asphyxiation does to a person’s face: the eyes staring forward as if in horror, laced with thin red spiderwebs of blood; the tongue, rolled out and over to one side; the lips, inflated and purplish at the edges. I close my eyes, rub them with my knuckles, and look again, try to get a sense of what the insurance man’s appearance had been in life. He wasn’t handsome, that you can see right away. The face is doughy and the proportions are all just a little off: chin too small, nose too big, the eyes almost beady behind the thick lenses.
What it looks like is that the insurance man killed himself with a long black belt. He fastened one end to the grab bar and worked the other end into the hangman’s knot that now digs brutally upward into his Adam’s apple.
“Hey, kid. Who’s your friend?”
“Peter Anthony Zell,” I answer quietly, looking up over my shoulder at Dotseth, who has opened the door of the stall and stands grinning down at me in a jaunty plaid scarf, clutching a steaming cup of McDonald’s coffee.
“Caucasian male. Thirty-eight years old. He worked in insurance.”
“And let me guess,” says Dotseth. “He was eaten by a shark. Oh, wait, no: suicide. Is it suicide?”
“It appears that way.”
“Shocked, I am! Shocked!” Denny Dotseth is an assistant attorney general, a warhorse with silver hair and a broad, cheerful face. “Oh, geez, I’m sorry, Hank. Did you want a cup of coffee?”
“No, thank you, sir.”
I give Dotseth a report on what I’ve learned from the black faux-leather wallet in the victim’s back pocket. Zell was employed at a company called Merrimack Life and Fire, with offices in the Water West Building, off Eagle Square. A little collection of movie stubs, all dating from the last three months, speaks to a taste for adolescent adventure: the Lord of the Rings revival; two installments of the sci-fi serial Distant Pale Glimmers; the DC-versus-Marvel thing at the IMAX in Hooksett. No trace of a family, no photographs in the wallet at all. Eighty-five dollars in fives and tens. And a driver’s license, with an address here in town: 14 Matthew Street Extension, South Concord.
“Oh, sure. I know that area. Some nice little town houses down that way. Rolly Lewis has a place over there.”
“And he got beat up.”
“Rolly?”
“The victim. Look.” I turn back to the insurance man’s distorted face and point to a cluster of yellowing bruises, high on the right cheek. “Someone banged him one, hard.”
“Oh, yeah. He sure did.”
Dotseth yawns and sips his coffee. New Hampshire statute has long required that someone from the office of the attorney general be called whenever a dead body is discovered, so that if a murder case is to be built, the prosecuting authority has a hand in from Go. In mid-January this requirement was overturned by the state legislature as being unduly onerous, given the present unusual circumstances—Dotseth and his colleagues hauling themselves all over the state just to stand around like crows at murder scenes that aren’t murder scenes at all. Now, it’s up to the discretion of the investigating officer whether to call an AAG to a 10-54S. I usually go ahead and call mine in.
“So what else is new, young man?” says Dotseth. “You still
playing a little racquetball?”
“I don’t play racquetball, sir,” I say, half listening, eyes locked on the dead man.
“You don’t? Who am I thinking of?”
I’m tapping a finger on my chin. Zell was short, five foot six maybe; stubby, thick around the middle. Holy moly, I’m still thinking, because something is off about this body, this corpse, this particular presumptive suicide, and I’m trying to figure out what it is.
“No phone,” I murmur.
“What?”
“His wallet is here, and his keys, but there’s no cell phone.”
Dotseth shrugs. “Betcha he junked it. Beth just junked hers. Service is starting to get so dicey, she figured she might as well get rid of the darn thing now.“
I nod, murmur “sure, sure,” still staring at Zell.
“Also, no note.”
“What?”
“There’s no suicide note.”
“Oh, yeah?” he says, shrugs again. “Probably a friend will find it. Boss, maybe.” He smiles, drains the coffee. “They all leave notes, these folks. Although, you have to say, explanation not really necessary at this point, right?”
“Yes, sir,” I say, running a hand over my mustache. “Yes, indeed.”
Last week in Kathmandu, a thousand pilgrims from all over southeast Asia walked into a massive pyre, monks chanting in a circle around them before marching into the blaze themselves. In central Europe, old folks are trading how-to DVDs: How toWeigh Your Pockets with Stones, How to Mix a Barbiturate Cocktail in the Sink. In the American Midwest—Kansas City, St. Louis, Des Moines—the trend is firearms, a solid majority employing a shotgun blast to the brain.
Here in Concord, New Hampshire, for whatever reason, it’s hanger town. Bodies slumped in closets, in sheds, in unfinished basements. A week ago Friday, a furniture-store owner in East Concord tried to do it the Hollywood way, hoisted himself from an overhanging length of gutter with the sash of his bathrobe, but the gutter pipe snapped, sent him tumbling down onto the patio, alive but with four broken limbs.
“Anyhow, it’s a tragedy,” Dotseth concludes blandly. “Every one of them a tragedy.”
He shoots a quick look at his watch; he’s ready to boogie. But I’m still down in a squat, still running my narrowed eyes over the body of the insurance man. For his last day on earth, Peter Zell chose a rumpled tan suit and a pale blue button-down dress shirt. His socks almost but don’t quite match, both of them brown, one dark and one merely darkish, both loose in their elastic, slipping down his calves. The belt around his neck, what Dr. Fenton will call the ligature, is a thing of beauty: shiny black leather, the letters B&R etched into the gold buckle.
“Detective? Hello?” Dotseth says, and I look up at him and I blink. “Anything else you’d like to share?”
“No, sir. Thank you.”
“No sweat. Pleasure as always, young man.”
“Except, wait.”
“Sorry?”
I stand up straight and turn and face him. “So. I’m going to murder somebody.” A pause. Dotseth waiting, amused, exaggerated patience. “All righty.”
“And I live in a time and a town where people are killing themselves all over the place. Right and left. It’s hanger town.”
“Okay.”
“Wouldn’t my move be, kill my victim and then arrange it to appear as a suicide?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe, right?”
“Yeah. Maybe. But that right there?” Dotseth jabs a cheerful thumb toward the slumped corpse. “That’s a suicide.”
He winks, pushes open the door of the men’s room, and leaves me alone with Peter Zell.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 1594746745
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Quirk Books; First Edition (May 13, 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9781594746741
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1594746741
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.21 x 0.85 x 8.01 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #342,393 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #676 in Metaphysical & Visionary Fiction (Books)
- #2,653 in Dystopian Fiction (Books)
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Ben H. Winters

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Ben H. Winters is the author most recently of the novel The Quiet Boy (Mulholland/Little, Brown, 2021). He is also the author of the novel Golden State; the New York Times bestselling Underground Airlines; The Last Policeman and its two sequels; the horror novel Bedbugs; and several works for young readers. His first novel, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, was also a Times bestseller. Ben has won the Edgar Award for mystery writing, the Philip K. Dick award in science fiction, the Sidewise Award for alternate history, and France’s Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire. Ben also writes for film and television; he was a producer on the FX show Legion, and on the upcoming Apple TV+ drama Manhunt. He has contributed short stories to many anthologies, as well as in magazines such as Lightspeed. He is the author of three “Audible Originals”– Inside Jobs, Q&A, and Self Help — and several plays and musicals. His reviews and essays have appeared in Slate and in the New York Times Book Review. Ben was born in Washington, D.C., grew up in Maryland, educated in St. Louis, and then grew up a bunch more, in various ways, in places like Chicago, New York, Cambridge, MA, and Indianapolis, IN. These days he lives in LA with his wife, three kids, and one large dog.

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Kindle Customer

Terrific (but reminiscent of something older...)

Reviewed in the United States on April 24, 2014

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Terrific, terrific, terrific. It's not often that someone 'breaks the mould' of the detective genre these days.

[I wrote those words after first reading this great book about six months ago. I may have been a little hasty. No mould was broken. I still feel the same about this book, it is great. However, I recently read a title by an author I'd forgotten I liked, and it got me wondering. The book was Martin Cruz Smith's 'Three Stations', one of the few Arkady Renko novels that I hadn't read in years gone by (Gorky Park, Polar Star, Stallions Gate etc). I was struck, actually pole-axed might be a better word, by how terribly similar the story lines in those novels and in this one area. In addition to that, the writing style is almost exactly the same. Now I'm not talking copy-catting here at all, we are all 'influenced' by other works. But the similarities are there. The biggest one is this: this series is about an honest policeman, Hank Palace, trying to do his best to continue to doggedly solve a mystery(s) while all around him the world, as in society, is crumbling. In Cruz Smith's Akady Renko series, Renko is an honest policeman trying to do his best to continue to doggedly solve a mystery(s) while all around him the world, as in society, is crumbling. The differences basically come down to a) an asteroid hitting the Earth (Last Policeman) and b) the Soviet Union collapsing (Renko Series, at least the early ones). So the old saying that there is nothing new in the world is right after all. Whether Winters knowingly aligned his work with Cruz Smith's we will never know. I invite readers to compare and make up their own minds.] Now, back to the review...

With the world facing certain annihilation from a rapidly approaching asteroid, the world is, quite understandably, going to pot. Our protagonist Detective Hank Palace, like a good ship's captain, continues to do his job despite society and the police system collapsing around him. If I had one criticism about this book (and the other in the series) it would be the slightly unsatisfactory open-endedness of the stories. But then, given the dire subject matter that is, literally, hanging over everyone's head, I can forgive that. This is a refreshing, engaging and quite unique take on detective fiction. My greatest chagrin is reserved for the fact that I didn't think of it first!

[Second, and last, addition. Having now read all three books in this trilogy, I think the mild and only criticism I mentioned can be safely put to bed. Suffice it to say that Winters does tie up all the mysteries by the series' end quite nicely. Not perfectly, but good enough.]

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B. Capossere

an’t wait for the concluding book, Highly recommended

Reviewed in the United States on January 19, 2014

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Because I read Ben Winter’s The Last Policeman and Countdown City over the course of a day and a half, I’m going to review them together rather than singly. Though really, the fact that I read them both in that time period is probably all you need to know about what I thought of them. (no spoilers even though I discuss the second book)

The two novels are set in Concord, N.H. and center on newly-made detective Hank Palace as he tries to solve a possible murder/insurance fraud in the first novel and a missing person’s case in the second. Oh yeah, and there’s also the little matter of the imminent collapse of human society thanks to the extinction-level asteroid coming Earth’s way in six months in The Last Policeman and in only 77 days in Countdown City.

Typically, these sorts of stories give us a somewhat world-weary detective facing multiple obstacles in order to get to the truth and restore at least a semblance of order on the (possibly very small) world. Here, though, there will be no restoration of world order, as the world is about to end. And the “obstacles” aren’t simply a corrupt or slow bureaucracy, but an entire society that has pretty much given up: people are leaving their jobs in droves, “going bucket” to realize dreams they once had; communication lines are dying off as employees disappear and people stop paying bills; even McDonalds has shut down. Our first-person narrator Hank describes the current situation this way:
There are differences in behavior, but they are on the margins. The main difference, from a law-enforcement perspective, is more atmospheric. . The mood here in town is that of the child who isn’t in trouble yet, but knows he’s going to be. He’s up in his room, waiting. “Just wait till your father gets home.” He’s sullen and snappish, he’s on edge. Confused, sad, trembling against the knowledge of what’s coming next, and right on the edge of violence, not angry but anxious in a way that can easily shade into anger.

As for the authorities, the police force is down to less than a skeletal staff (though they and the govt. are the only ones still able to have cars/gas); the crime lab is nearly non-existent; and anyway—who cares whether someone commits a crime at this point? As for world-weary, well, Hank is young, a relative innocent in the ways of the normal world, let alone this one, and he’s tired of “People hiding behind the asteroid, like it’s an excuse for poor conduct, for miserable and desperate and selfish behavior.”

And there is a good amount of that sort of behavior going on as Hank tries against all odds to solve the murder of Peter Fell, insurance investigator found with a belt wrapped around his neck in a pirate McDonald’s bathroom, though everyone else simply dismisses him as the typical “hangar”—suicide method of choice in Concord (other regions have their own favorite methods).

Hank’s desire to do a job well contrasts the wry fatalism that runs throughout most of the novel, either in the background (references to end-of-the-world songs playing) or in the foreground via dialog:
I used to want to be a cop.
Hey, it’s never too late.
Well, it is though.

In The Last Policeman, the asteroid and the reactions to it mostly plays out in this fatalism, sometimes dry, sometimes sad, occasionally but rarely violent. I really liked the fact that Winter doesn’t dwell on the asteroid itself, whose discovery, approach and impending results are only gradually and minimally revealed. This is a quiet pre-apocalyptic novel, not a bang-bang Road Warrior/The Road sort of post-apocalyptic one.

The mystery is well plotted and interesting in its own right, but really what makes this book (both books) so compelling is the rich pre-apocalyptic atmosphere and Hank’s characterization, along with other characters that come in and out of the mix—his somewhat oddball sister, who is mixed up with conspiracy theorists; Dr. Fenton, the local coroner who also believes in a job done well regardless of context; Sgt. Culverson, a mentor figure for Hank; and a host of others large and small.

By the time of Countdown City, the more imminent end has turned Concord much more dangerous as people begin to hoard food, loot, use guns to defend themselves or take from others, and so on. Hank is no longer on the force by this time, so as he looks for the missing husband of a childhood friend, his difficulties are exponentially higher, especially as he no longer has vehicle access and has to bike/walk everywhere. Countdown City is a darker, more violent, grimmer work, but still with lots of the wryly flat gallows humor of the first book.

I only had a few minor, very minor, complaints. One is we have a few too many shootout/helicopter-at-the-last-minute moments, though really there aren’t all that many. It’s just that the focus on people and relationships is so quietly good that those moments are a bit jarring, though they do make perfect sense in the context of the setting (save for that damn helicopter arrival). Another is that the missing husband character is played a bit too goody-goody with the “He’s just Brett” phrase used a bit too freely. But as I mentioned, these were minor complaints. I was captivated by both setting and character in both, opening up Countdown City on my Kindle immediately upon finishing The Last Policeman. I can’t wait for the concluding book coming sometime this year. Highly recommended.

(this review originally appeared on fantasyliterature.com)

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Francis Perea

Una interesante propuesta

Reviewed in Spain on April 13, 2019

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Una visión algo distópica de un futuro próximo. Un policía vocacional en un mundo con fecha de caducidad. Muy interesante. Te atrapa desde la primera página con una lectura dinámica y muy entretenido. Tal y como he terminado la última página me he comprado el segundo libro de la trilogía.

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paola giordano

Consigliato

Reviewed in Italy on August 26, 2016

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Parte da una vicenda originale così come è originale il suo protagonista, un investigatore promosso da poco che non è sempre perspicace

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Sid Shugarman

What Would You Do?

Reviewed in Canada on August 24, 2014

Verified Purchase

Fascinating premise- very well done- holds ones interest throughout. What would you do if you knew that the Earth as we know it would essentially end when a huge asteroid strikes the surface? Looking forward to the second book in the series.

Amazon Customer

Mehr Krimi als SF-Roman

Reviewed in Germany on May 22, 2013

Verified Purchase

Vor dem Hintergrund des anstehenden Weltuntergangs - ein Komet rast auf die Erde zu und wird die Welt, wie wir sie kennen, auslöschen - ermittelt ein Polizist in einem vermeintlichen Selbstmordfall. Während um ihn herum die Gesellschaft immer mehr zusammenbricht, verfolgt er standhaft Spuren, redet mit Zeugen, kommt immer neuen Geheimnissen auf die Spur.

Die melancholische Stimmung, die Angst vor dem Ende, das alles vermittelt der Autor sehr gelungen. Knappe Beschreibungen, kaum ein Wort zu viel - toll geschrieben. Leider ist das Szenario mit dem Kometen eher Kulisse für die Geschichte als Teil der Handlung. Und leider ist der Fall vor dem Hintergrund des drohenden Weltuntergangs etwas zu klein geraten. Es gibt Andeutungen über eine größere Verschwörung, von der ich hoffe, dass sie in den Folgebänden eine Rolle spielt.

Fazit: ein solider Krimi vor einer außergewöhnlichen Kulisse, der etwas spannender hätte sein können.

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Book I Last policeman

Reviewed in Australia on April 14, 2014

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set up for the story was well done character introduction interesting story moves along well worth a read enjoyed it enough to read book II

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