Crítics Matiners

What’s the point in solving murders if we’re all going to die? Detective Hank Palace has asked this question ever since asteroid 2011L47J hovered into view. Several kilometers wide, it’s on a collision course with planet Earth, with just six precious months until impact. The Last Policeman presents a fascinating portrait of a pre-apocalyptic United States. Industry is grinding to a halt. Most people have abandoned their jobs. But not Hank Palace. As our story opens, he’s investigating the latest suicide in a city that’s full of suicides—only this one feels wrong. This one feels like homicide. And Palace is the only one who cares. What’s the point in solving murders if we’re all going to die? The Last Policeman offers a story we’ve never read before: A police procedural set on the brink of an apocalypse. What would any of us do, what would we really do, if our days were numbered? BEN H. WINTERS is a New York Times best-selling author (Quirk’s Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters) and an Edgar Award nominee (for the HarperCollins YA novel The Secret Life of Ms. Finkelman). His most recent novel, Bedbugs (Quirk, 2011), was hailed by Vanity Fair as a “diabolical tale of paranoia.” He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.