The gritty follow-up to Toby Ball's acclaimed noir thriller The Vaults takes us back to his dystopian City, fifteen years later . . .The second book in the City Trilogy, Scorch City is a dark and unsettling thriller of urban unease. Journalist Frank Frings rouses Lt. Piet Westermann in the middle of the night with an unusual request: move the body of a dead blonde from where she was found—on the bank of a river near the utopian Uhuru Community, a shantytown under threat from a deadly coalition of racists and anticommunists—and find out how the body actually got there. As the investigation deepens, the deaths and disappearances add up, and the detectives of the City must uncover the truth behind Uhuru and the murders, while keeping their own dark secrets hidden within the streets of the unforgiving City.

In this visionary dystopian thriller, the hunt is on for a haul of explosives that shouldn't get into the wrong hands . . . or should it? A brilliantly imagined thriller, Invisible Streets is a sprawling, noirish epic of crime and corruption by an author who has been compared to Caleb Carr, James Ellroy, and Jonathan Lethem. It's the mid-1960s, and the City is a hulking shell of itself. Bohemians, crooks, and snarling anti-Communists have their run of the place, but if Nathan Canada has his way, all this decline and decadence will soon be nothing but a distant memory. His New City Project will paper over the grit and the grime, making the City safe for the rich. According to Canada and his influential allies, the project is the City's last best hope—but according to everyone else in town, it's a death knell. So when the Project's cache of explosives goes missing, everyone is a suspect, and police detective Torsten Grip finds himself up against...

SUMMARY: In a dystopian 1930s America, a chilling series of events leads three men down a path to uncover their city's darkest secret.At the height of the most corrupt administration in the City’s history, a mysterious duplicate file is discovered deep within the Vaults---a cavernous hall containing all of the municipal criminal justice records of the last seventy years. From here, the story follows: Arthur Puskis, the Vault’s sole, hermit-like archivist with an almost mystical faith in a system to which he has devoted his life; Frank Frings, a high-profile investigative journalist with a self-medicating reefer habit; and Ethan Poole, a socialist private eye with a penchant for blackmail. All three men will undertake their own investigations into the dark past and uncertain future of the City---calling into question whether their most basic beliefs can be maintained in a climate of overwhelming corruption and conspiracy Toby Ball's imagined city is a fever dream in which virtue barely survives the corruption all around it." -Justin Evans, author of A GOOD AND HAPPY CHILD "If George Orwell and Dashiell Hammett have ever decided to collaborate on a book, they might have come up with something like The Vaults. A wonderful debut from a writer to watch." -Michael Harvey, The Chicago Way"With a Kafka-esque view filtered through a Jasper Fforde lens, Toby Ball gives us the gray terror of Any City in Any Unnamed Year that could reach from 1930 to today, and reminds us, once again, of the important of vigilance and the danger of Big Boss rule. Masterfully created."-Louise Ure, Shamus Award-winning author of Liars “Ball has conjured a fully-evoked world in his nameless city that, for all its 1930s trappings, retains that surreal and timeless atmosphere of Gotham, BRAVE NEW WORLD, and 1984. A provocative and dazzling debut.” - Blake Crouch, author of Abandon