In the future, the Hawaiian Islands contain the last bastion of humanity after some undefined global catastrophe. Under the direction of elitist technocrat “Designers” (who are venerated by some to the point of religious worship), the archipelago has been transformed into individual, multitiered city-states reliant on high technology, recycling, and imported resources to function. An uneasy detente exists between the island cities (political strife caused the destruction of the city of Honolulu). Designed Psychological Manifestation entities—implanted, sentient AI assistants reflecting the user’s original personality—are largely outlawed, but investigator Kilohana “Kilo” Ressler still has one, a pseudo-twin named EO. (“He resided between worlds, able to interact with me and the environment around him while remaining invisible and imperceptible to everyone else.”) Kilo (and, unavoidably, EO) has no choice but to embark on a mission dictated by the Designers. Expeditions to the poison-tainted “Continent” to mine vital island necessities are yielding higher death rates than the sanctioned quotas allow—someone is up to something. To solve the mystery, Kilo must reluctantly descend into “the Below”—roiling, semi-lawless underground realms of the poor, the criminal, and the exploited—and confront his own origin. The logline of Miller’s SF debut suggests Blade Runner colliding with Hawaii Five-0; the author has acknowledged Philip K. Dick as an influence on this futuristic detective thriller, which is hardboiled to the point of near-nihilism and flavored with the odors of machine oil and lab-grown meat. In the tradition of Dick’s work, the novel is rife with fiendish conspiracies, deceits, disloyalties, injustices, and impostures that never quite get sorted out. The backdrop of Pacific and Polynesian cultures never feels like a gimmick (there’s no gratuitous surfing). Parsing the dense text is not always easy—readers may go through several chapters before realizing that EO is not corporeal.