A Son of the Rock

Tor, 2025, 123 p.

Rose House was deceased architect Basit Deniau’s greatest creation, “curled like the petals of a gypsum crystal in the shadow of a dune” in the Mojave desert. Rose House is the house where he died – and his mausoleum, his compressed remains fashioned into a diamond displayed on a plinth. It was left in his will to Deniau’s one-time student turned critic Dr Selene Gisil. Only she can have access – and only for seven days a year.

Rose House is a haunt, embedded with artificial intelligence. Selene hates it so much she left after only three of those days and fled to Turkey to pursue her career there.

Rose House has just telephoned China Lake Police Precinct to inform its officers there is a dead body inside it, as it was legally required to do.

The novella Rose/House is a locked room mystery, whose subject matter lies at the intersection of Science Fiction, horror and crime. A locked room (or locked house) to which the police cannot gain access.

A neat premise, certainly, and a book densely, even philosophically, written.

So, how did someone gain entry to Rose House only to be killed? And how can the police solve a crime or even assess the scene in such a restricted building?

To Detective Maritza Smith – forced to identify as the inanimate China Lake Police Precinct in order to gain entry along with Selene, recalled from Turkey – the house has a pervading sense of menace. To the reader it comes across like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Martine handles all this well. But the novella’s setting in the late 22^nd century seems much too far off.

Pedant’s corner:- “which oughtn’t have surprised her” (oughtn’t to have surprised her,) “Torres’ offer” (Torres’s,) “amongst Los Angeles’ most distinguished” (Los Angeles’s,) “sat in the back seat” (seated; or sitting,) a sentence ending in ‘did they’ but without a question mark, “chile enchilada” (chili enchilada,) putrescene (putrescine – used later.)