I loved the setting for this mystery—a New York City far in the future, a city that is now an archipelago of its skyscrapers' highest floors, since a massive flood wiped out the east coast all the way to Chicago. Anything below 21 stories is covered in water, and the residents have adapted to become a city of boats and bridges, surrounded by looming sea and storms.
It's equal parts scifi and mystery, and the author seamlessly weaves in and out of both genres. I don't know if the science measured up to any existing technology, but it was fun to imagine how this setting might work. The atmosphere he created was dangerous and alluring, and I hope I get to visit this version of New York again. The ending completed the story, but there's room for more if the author decided to write more. A great book to finish off another year of reading. ( )

Every noir cliché from every book and film you've seen come together with a twist of an implausible sci-fi setting where women are forbidden to wear trousers to form this wholly derivative insult to the genre topped with a cherry of fairytale physics. Maybe if the parody was intentional it wouldn't be so annoying. The twist of having an all female cast (and a gay dude) is novel for about 10 pages and contrived thereon.
The heroine who is, in her own words, one of the very best of the dozen or so PIs in New York is comically incompetent and solves the case through sheer luck and constant help from everyone around her (including villains!) and it's not played for laughs as there is no humour in the book - only bad clichés: from cop dad, blonde femme fatale to promiscuous gays. Everyone swears like sailors which I guess is meant to be shocking because they are all women and women never swear in the real world.
The book is close to being so bad it's good. Possibly the worst book I've read, wouldn't have finished it were I not on holiday at the time. Final verdict: rubbish/5. ( )

The writing style is that of young adult fiction, but the premise is interesting, but not enough to keep it afloat. ( )

I've had this on my TBR list for quite some time so I am glad to have finally got around to reading it. That said, it's a short book that took me far longer than it should have because I just didn't find the mystery all that compelling (something that surprised me because the summary really sounded promising). My favorite thing about this was the setting which I still want to know more about. I don't know if I'd recommend this one for mystery fans as it's pretty bland on that level. I would read another by Rosen as I think he's got interesting ideas and a good take on climate fiction settings & world-building. ( )

Depth by Lev AC Rosen is a recommended detective novel set in a future NYC. Simone Pierce is a private investigator who, when the story opens, is "on the roof of a twenty-four-story building, so the ocean lay four stories down, churning just below the twenty-first floor. The fog was thick, but she could hear the waves lapping at the other buildings around her, and the worn wooden bridges that connected them to one another and to the permanently moored boats that made up New York City. New York, city of bridges and boats."

Simone is on a routine surveillance case of a husband suspected of cheating when she takes on a second job, escorting Alejandro DeCostas around the city. DeCostas is a visiting European archaeologist who wants to explore NYC looking for a rumored building that is water tight and dry below the sea level. While working both jobs, the surveillance case morphs into something else and takes on a life of its own. Simone is assisted in her inquiries by her friends, Caroline Khan, deputy major, Danny, a fugitive human computer, and Paul Weiss, a cop.

What is interesting and has great potential at the beginning is the setting - NYC under water and cut off from the rest of a vastly changed USA. Rosen writes:
"New York, though technically still part of the United States, had long begun to consider itself its own country, hundreds of miles from the Chicago coastline and the conservative, religious mainland. The Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial had been airlifted to Salt Lake City, but no one tried moving New York. All the other drowned cities, like DC and Boston, were graveyards now—spires and flat tops of buildings tilting out unevenly from under the water like old headstones. Not New York. Though some older buildings had been worn away by the waves, others, retrofitted and laminated in that technological wonder Glassteel, stayed where they were as the ocean rose, closing off the bottom floors as they filled with water. There were newer buildings, too, designed to withstand the water, and decommissioned boats clever entrepreneurs had bought and moored around the city. There were a million New Yorkers left, and they were stubborn. They built the bridges themselves, and everyone bought personal algae generators and desalination filters for their apartments, stringing them out the windows into the sea. They reassembled their city. They stayed."

The potential for an intriguing story is all in place. The problem is Rosen has this great setting but neglects to make full use of it. The detective/mystery story is solid, but could easily be transferred to another setting, with some minor changes, and work just as well. This left me with a dilemma. I chose to review Depth based on the setting. The detective story is well written and satisfying but I kept longing for more information on the world. The search for a dry building underwater could just as easily be a search for a secret cache of some other treasure. This reduces the mystery to a formulaic plot that just happens to be set in a changed world and nothing in the plot elevated it above that for me.

Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Regan Arts for review purposes.


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