If tracking Akira Kimura’s killing through the drowned corridors of Water City hooked you, you’ll love following Marîd Audran through the Budayeen’s alleys as he unravels a cyber-modified murder spree. Like the ex-bodyguard piecing together Kimura’s secrets, Marîd dives into black-market tech, gang brokers, and identity hacks, with each clue twisting the case—and his own sense of self—into darker territory.

You vibed with the grim, rain-slick tone of the Water City spires and the way a single death uncovers a rot of power—so meet Takeshi Kovacs. As with the fallout from Kimura’s murder, Kovacs’s inquiry into a wealthy magnate’s ‘suicide’ drags him through corporate strongholds, body upgrades, and bone-crunching violence. It’s the same razor-edged noir heat your detective faced, only with bodies—and truths—being swapped as easily as identities.

If you were drawn to your narrator’s compromises as Akira Kimura’s former bodyguard—balancing loyalty, truth, and survival—you’ll click with master thief Jean le Flambeur. Like the Water City investigation where favors and betrayals blur the line between protector and predator, Jean schemes through posthuman tech, shifting alliances, and mind games where winning means outwitting the rules themselves.

If Water City’s flooded high-rises and drowned boulevards—where class stratification rises with the waterline—stuck with you, Robinson’s vision of a partially sunken Manhattan will hit the same nerve. As with the ripples from Kimura’s legacy, financial schemes, community resilience, and ecological reality intersect, showing how a city learns to live—and scheme—on the water.

If the intimate, hardboiled first-person narration pulled you through the twists of Kimura’s murder, Tanner Mirabel’s voice will feel right at home. He stalks a plague-warped city full of memory edits and body mods—much like the augmented layers and back-alley tech in Water City—while the investigation peels back his past with the same relentless, personal intensity.