The sound of waves crashing against the beach repeats every 42 seconds. Less than a minute and a seagull squawks again. I could measure time easily if the pattern repeated every 60 seconds. Instead: 42, 84, 126. Two minutes gone. Forever. I reach up, turn off the machine. Without ocean sounds, I can’t sleep. Is…

The Orange Salamander describes a small-town mystery, but ‘small-town mystery’ is as conventional as the story’s description gets. If you mixed a hard-boiled crime story with a cyberpunk novel, and asked a non-writer to write it, The Orange Salamander is what you might get. The story is a twiller, a thriller told in small bits,…