Extremity by Nicholas Binge Format: eARC
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: horror, science fiction, science fiction horror, science fiction mystery
Pages: 176
Published by Tordotcom on September 16, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
*A time-traveling, end-of-the-world police procedural, Extremity is True Detective if written by Philip K. Dick.*
When once-renowned police detective Julia Torgrimsen is brought out of forced retirement to investigate the murder of Bruno Donaldson, a billionaire she worked with whilst undercover, she doesn't expect to find two bodies. Both are Bruno--identical down to the fingerprints--and both have been shot.
As the investigation sucks her back into the macabre world of London's rich elite, she finds herself on the hunt for a mysterious assassin who has been taking out the wealthy one by one. But when she finally catches up with her quarry, she unveils an entire world of secrets: impossible documents about future stock market crashes, photographs of dead clones, and a clandestine time-travelling conspiracy so insidious it might just mean the extinction of the entire human race.
If Julia is to have any chance of preventing this terrible future, she'll have to revisit her own past, the terrible choices she made undercover, and the brutal act that destroyed her once legendary career.
My Review:
It begins as a straight-up police procedural. It just doesn’t end there. Or, quite possibly, at all.
At first, things seem fairly ordinary, for select values of ordinary. A man is dead, shot in the middle of his office. It does go pear-shaped from there, but in ways that are also, well, sort of ordinary. Or at least ordinary if the dead man is one of the richest men in the world.
Meaning that the place is lousy with lawyers even before the cops arrive, all hell-bent (possibly literally) on keeping the dead man’s secrets. But still, that IS what most likely happens in these cases.
Even when the dead man resembles a combination of this world’s richest and most eccentric tech mogul AND one of many such rich people who had more than a nodding acquaintance with the world’s richest and most influential sex trafficker.
Which just means he had more secrets than the average megabillionaire – possibly – and more than enough money and influence to cover all of his misdeeds up. After all, he’s done that before, as Detective Chief Inspector John Grossman of New Scotland Yard and his retired former partner, Julia Torgrimsen can certainly attest.
No one, except possibly his lawyers and minions, is all that sorry that Bruno Donaldson is dead, but there are a lot of detectives stumped over how it was done, and a lot of lawyers putting up roadblocks to make sure that no one finds out.
Because there’s a second dead body – and it’s a second Bruno Davidson. But this body isn’t exactly a clone. It’s not exactly not, either. On the outside, it looks exactly like the first Bruno (and OMG yes we are going to talk about Bruno), but on the inside it’s just meat and muscle. No organs. Which is where this story heads straight out of the everyday – even the everyday for über-rich and influential people – and trips right over into science fiction.
Everybody has always known that Bruno was messing with a whole lot of things that he should have ended up imprisoned for – if people like him ever got held accountable for their dirty deeds in the first place. But someone is determined that Bruno and his little cabal of the rich and unaccountable are going to pay with their lives for the evil that they have – and will – commit.
Because everyone else already will.
Escape Rating A-: This was a very quick and interesting read. I expected quick as its under 200 pages, and I was hoping for interesting, which I definitely got. What I unexpectedly got was a book that reminded me a LOT of Adam Oyebanji’s Esperance – only better because Extremity stuck the dismount.
Both are stories that start out as seemingly ordinary police procedurals but then veer right off the cliff of ordinary into SF by way of crimes that were totally impossible to commit for motives that are, let’s say, difficult to believe – at best. Then they sail right off into time and/or space travel or a bit of both and we’ve landed right in the kind of situation that belongs in either the Terminator franchise or Adrian Tchaikovsky’s One Day All This Will Be Yours. (That is a hint. There are timey-wimey bits here and unlike the ones in the Tchaikovsky book they are NOT pretty.)
Places I wasn’t expecting to go at all – let alone to have carried out with the perfect twist at the end. Which I’m not going to spoil.
The idea at the heart of this story, however, is the same thing that underpins both the Terminator franchise and the Tchaikovsky book. It’s the problem of time travel and the butterfly flapping its wings. Because going back in time, or for that matter forward in time, is bound to change things. Even if you think you’ve done nothing, there’s still the observer effect to consider. That you’ve SEEN things and the things have seen you and that either your knowledge, or theirs, or the fact that you existed in that space-time for whatever amount of time will have a long term effect for good or bad.
And that’s with the best of intentions. The kind of person that Bruno Donaldson was, and the kind of people that he hung around with, pretty much never had the best of intentions in the first place. Generally the opposite.
So the science fiction of this story is about dealing with the consequences of their actions. Or, to be more accurate, reckoning with those consequences. But the way that the story gets told is through the characters, which takes us right back to those police procedural tropes of Julia, the lone wolf going out on a limb for either justice or vengeance; Grossman, the administrator who wishes he were still back on the streets investigating crimes and nabbing perps, and Cochrane, the naive newbie apprentice who is in this mess up to his eyebrows and sinking fast, making everything worse at the speed of light.
We stick with the story for those characters, and hope they manage to clean up those messes before it’s too late, all too aware that it’s probably already too late. Only because it is. Or it’s messing with all of our heads on the way out the door. Or both. Most likely both.
And I turned out to be a whole lot more there for it than I expected. Because it got to its horrifying implications through a side door. If that kind of SF turns horrifying works for you, Extremity is definitely, even extremely definitely, worth a try.
