The Skill of Our Hands
A Novel
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4.7 • 7 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
"Secret societies, immortality, murder mysteries and Las Vegas all in one book? Shut up and take my money." —John Scalzi on The Incrementalists
The Incrementalists are a secret society of two hundred people—an unbroken lineage reaching back forty thousand years. They cheat death, share lives and memories, and communicate with one another across nations and time. They have an epic history, an almost magical memory, and a very modest mission: to make the world better, a little bit at a time.
Now Phil, the Incrementalist whose personality has stayed stable through more incarnations than anyone else’s, has been shot dead. They’ll bring him back—but first they need to know what happened. Their investigation will lead down unexpected paths in Arizona, and bring them up against corruption, racism, and brutality in high and low places alike.
But the key may lay in one of Phil’s previous lives, in “Bleeding Kansas” in the late 1850s—and the fate of the passionate abolitionist we remember as John Brown.
Steven Brust and Skyler White's The Skill of Our Hands is the thrilling and thought-provoking follow-up to their critically acclaimed The Incrementalists.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brust and White follow 2013's The Incrementalists with this timely novel that examines immigration and police brutality through the device of a detective story. The story opens in April 2014 with Arizona activist Phil being shot and killed. Luckily for him, Phil is an Incrementalist, connected to other Incrementalists through a memory garden that allows them to pass along their personalities after the deaths of their bodies. They are also able to use the garden to gather information about people and "meddle" with them to positively influence events. Phil's attempt to overturn Arizona's draconian anti-immigration law, SB 1070, has gone disastrously awry, and now it is up to his friends to find a new person to host Phil's consciousness and to solve his murder, even if that means visiting his past life in the bloody Kansas of 1856. The unclear source of the Incrementalists' abilities makes this hard to categorize as fantasy or SF, but its examination of human responsibility in the face of inhumane policies strongly recalls some of Kim Stanley Robinson's best work.
