Only Forward
Michael Marshall Smith
 A small boy is left on his own in a flat. The boy answers a knocking on the front door of his high rise flat to find a man with no head standing on the doorstep. The man cannot speak, but the boy knows he is asking him for help. The boy apologises and, explaining that he cannot help him, closes the door and returns to playing games. The protagonist, Stark, a troubleshooter living in the Colour Neighbourhood, accepts a job from his friend, a high-ranking member of The Action Centre, Zenda Renn, and sets out to find senior Actioneer Fell Alkland, who appears to have gone missing under peculiar circumstances. Stark contacts another friend, a psychotic ganglord in the Red Neighbourhood named Ji, to assist him in tracking Alkland down, but something other than kidnapping is to blame for the old man's disappearance. Something that ties into Alkland's past, into The City itself. Stark is forced to confront both his past and a present which has become a living death, in a story of love lost and friendship betrayed. It takes him to places where dreams live, where they can come true, for better or for worse. Where they can kill you. In a world where past and future, reality and nightmare meet up and have a fistfight, Stark is the only man who can make the difference.