Exploded View

It’s 2050, and LAPD Detective Terri Pastuzka has drawn the short straw with her first assignment of the new decade. Someone has executed one of the city’s countless immigrants, and no one (besides the usual besieged advocacy groups) seems to much care. Even Terri herself is already looking ahead to her next case before an unexpected development reveals there’s far more to this corpse than meets the eye.

And a lot already meets the eye. In a city immersed in augmented reality, the LAPD have their own superior network of high-tech eyewear—PanOpts, the ultimate panopticon—allowing Terri instant access to files and suspects and literal insertion into the crime scene using security footage captured from every angle the day the murder occurred. What started as a single homicide turns into a string of unsolved murders that tie together in frightening ways, leading Terri down a rabbit hole through Los Angeles’s conflicting realities—augmented and virtual, fantastically rumored and harrowingly true—towards an impossible conclusion.

Exploded View is the story of a city frozen in crisis, haunted by hardship and overwhelmed by refugees, where technology gives everyday citizens the power to digitally reshape news in real time, and where hard video evidence is impotent against the sheer, unrelenting power of belief. After all, when anyone can forge their own version of the truth, what use is any other reality?

Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.

Sam McPheeters was born in 1969 and raised in Albany, New York. Starting in 1989, he led several punk bands, including NY’s Born Against. In the following fifteen years, he sold nearly one hundred thousand records and toured seventeen times across the United States, Europe, and Japan. Since 2009, he has written for the Believer, Chicago Reader, Criterion, the Stranger, Vice, and the Village Voice.

“A police procedural that says as much about the present day as it does about the culture of the near-future. With an ending that will leave you reeling, Exploded View forces you to question everything you think you know about reality.”
—Richard Cox, author of The Boys of Summer

“The book's powerful themes—the relationship of police to policed, trust in governmental authority, trust in the media, immigrant tensions, and generational change—are sharply executed . . . [Exploded View] might just leave you hesitating before taking the next reblogged video at face value.”
—Kirkus

“A futuristic police procedural that echoes themes by Philip K. Dick and Charles Stross. The suspense here builds to a satisfying conclusion resonating with authentic emotion and a profound question about life.”
—Booklist

“Darker, grittier, and definitely funnier than most cyberpunk fare, Exploded View is a twisted, witty, occasionally insane novel about the horrors of a world not that far removed from our own.”
—Barnes and Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog

“The writing is raw and the dialogue is real; Exploded View is not a story of what could be, but what may well be, and in the not-too-distant future, at that.”
—Steven John, author of Outrider and Three A.M.