The King of the City

The city eats everyone eventually. Our narrator knows this better than most - a former military man now piloting a battered groundcar through streets where armed escorts are the only thing between a traveler and a shallow grave. When he takes a job ferrying the mysterious businessman Stenn across the urban wasteland, he assumes it's just another run: pay the tolls, avoid the gangs, don't make eye contact with the men with the heavy weapons. But Stenn carries secrets - old military archives that certain powerful people will kill to keep buried, and a plan that could either save what's left of the crumbling city or burn it to the ground. As the miles accumulate and the threats multiply, our driver must choose: stay the cautious survivor he's become, or risk everything for a chance at something like redemption in a world where the law is a joke and power belongs to whoever's got the biggest gun. Laumer's 1961 vision of urban decay remains uncomfortably prescient - a hardboiled thriller wrapped in SF scaffolding, brutal and unflinching.