I don’t know about you, but I’ve recently noticed a resurgence in police procedurals with a genre element to them. There’s Rose/House by Arkady Martine, recently published here in the UK (but been out for a while in the US, admittedly.) Then there’s Elly Griffiths’ The Frozen People, a police procedural with a police team who can travel back in time (reviewed HERE.)
And now we have this novella.
From the publisher: “Infamous police detective Julia Torgrimsen is brought out of forced retirement to investigate the murder of Bruno Donaldson, a billionaire she worked with while undercover. But she doesn’t expect to find two bodies. Both are Bruno, identical down to the fingerprints – and both have been shot.
She soon finds herself on the hunt for a mysterious assassin who has been taking out London’s rich elite one by one. But when she finally catches up with her quarry, she unveils a world of deadly secrets: impossible documents about future stock market crashes; photographs of dead clones; and an insidious time-travelling conspiracy that threatens the entire human race.
If Julia is to have any chance of preventing this terrible future, she’ll have to revisit her undercover past and the brutal act that destroyed her once-legendary career . . .”
I read it in two sittings, but could have read it in one go. (Sometimes a man’s got to eat!) The characters are fairly developed, although the usual issue of lack of depth in a novella may be an issue for some. (How do you develop character in less than 200 pages?)
Nicholas gets around this a bit by using the normal police stereotypes that you may recognise from any TV show or movie – the hard-bitten, retired expert imparting their wisdom, the new inexperienced ‘rookie’ dealing with events for the first time, the embattled Commander struggling to deal simultaneously with the higher-up bureaucracy and the team obsessed with the case who regularly go off-piste and ignore the rules…. The TV series Life on Mars, anyone?
The style is interesting as it is initially written in the form of dictated police statements by a number of the main characters – Julia Torgrimsen (the almost-retired advisor with a grim past), DC Mark Cochrane (the newbie) and DCI John Grossman (the boss-guy). Some readers may find this rotation of descriptions a tad annoying, especially when the characters are talking about the same events from different perspectives, but I quite liked it.
The big plus is that by using the archetypes it does mean that a lot of the usual scene-setting and world-building is bypassed (as you know it already!) It is also mainly set in the present, which allows the writer (and the reader!) to focus on the new elements of the plot – such as the fact that (without going into details) there’s an SF-nal element that takes this into genre territory. Think Philip K Dick meets The X-Files.
Extremity is short and sharp; but brilliantly written, even though there are some loose ends. (I suspect that they might be deliberate.) It manages to make you feel for these characters very quickly and ground the SF stuff into something that feels quite ordinary. As a result, I think that it’s another book that might persuade those who don’t normally read SF to do so. There’s enough for non-genre readers to follow without feeling lost, whilst genre readers will appreciate the fact that it takes a mainstream setting but pushes it into science-fictional realms. It is not an easy task to manage and yet I think Nicholas manages it very well in such a short space.
© 2025 Mark Yon
Hardback | Tor Books (Pan Macmillan)
EXTREMITY by Nicholas Binge
September 2025 | 176 pages
ISBN: 978 1035 085 866
