The Rapture - Elliott Hall

Following an arduous debriefing about his investigation into the murder of Brother Isaiah, private eye and returned soldier Felix Strange is drawn into investigating the disappearance of old army buddy Issac Taylor. He owes Issac, not least because Issac saved his life in the field. But a cursory search reveals no evidence that Issac ever existed, a rare thing in a country whose citizens are now so well documented.
And then Strange discovers Issac is only one of an army of disappeared, as thoroughly and tracelessly, terrifyingly gone as the disappeared of south American totalitarian regimes past. But why?
This complex, noir-edged novel is the second in a planned trilogy that explores a post-apocalyptic, dystopia future with a difference, is absorbing and rapid. Unfortunately, like my review of its predecessor, The First Stone, I have waited a little too long after reading to go into specifics. Instead, i give you a taste of the style and tone:

The [mayor] we’d actually elected hadn’t lasted long after the Battle of Christopher Park last year. If you’d been asleep for the last ten years it might have looked like democracy in action: the mayor taking responsibility for not stopping an urban war that had left dozens in body bags and a lot more injured. He had held back the police while militias attacked his own constituents for the crime of being gay. The mayor had held the NYPD back on the orders of the Elders, the assholes who actually ran this excuse for a republic. We still had a Congress that anyone could run for, but every man there (and it was all men now) and even the President never would have gotten elected without their help. Some of the Elders had moved into government, but most stayed at their mega-churches and foundations, content for their power to be an open secret. I sometimes wished that they’d just move into the White House and be done with it, but America though too highly of itself to admit that it was a dictatorship.

I'm very much looking forward to reading the final installment in this complicated three-part series, which I will review immediately after I finish. - Alex