Ancillary Mercy

 
 
Ancillary Mercy

by Ann Leckie

Orbit

2015

 

 

Ancillary Mercy is the final book in Ann Leckie's trilogy following the last surviving segment of an imperial warship's computer mind, now confined in a single cybernetic body. For 20 years, Breq has been living in a single human body, mourning the loss of the rest of herself (both her ship-self and the dozens of other networked bodies that collectively made up her electronic brain), and planning revenge on Anaander Mianaai, the emperor of the Radchaai Empire. 

 

Mianaai is also distributed across countless bodies (clones, in her case). She has ruled the Radch for 3000 years, and for the past 1000 she's been in an unacknowledged cold war with herself after wiping out an entire star system - revenge for them resisting annexation into the Radch using weapons supplied by the alien Presger. After the massacre, Mianaai signed a treaty with the Presger and began reforming the Radch, eventually including no annexing new star systems into the empire, and no longer making ancillaries (the cybernetic bodies, like Breq, made from recently annexed civilians). But part of her never wanted to admit the massacre was wrong, and has been covertly scheming to force a return to unapologetic colonialism and chauvinism ever since.

 

We learned this, in flashback, in Ancillary Justice, as Breq remembered being the warship Justice of Toren, who was overseeing the last annexation, where the ultra conservative part of emperor Mianaai was secretly trying to stir up ethnic conflict as an excuse to start a mass killing of civilians. One of Justice of Toren's officers refused to go along and was summarily executed, Justice of Toren was heartbroken, and that part of Mianaai triggered the destruction of the warship, with the segment-body that eventually became Breq as the only survivor. In the book's present, Breq hunted down the only remaining alien weapon capable of killing Mianaai, the Presger gun, and took responsibility for a former officer, who'd been cryogenically frozen since the planetary massacre, and who, since being awoken 1000 years after her time, had become depressed and addicted to space drugs.

 

Breq managed to kill at least one segment of Mianaai, and more important, forced all of the emperor to realize that she was no longer one coherent mind spread across her many bodies, triggering open civil war. In Ancillary Sword, a reformist segment of Mianaai made Breq a fleet captain, gave her a ship and crew, and sent her to take control of a star system, including the inhabited planet, the space station orbiting the planet, and a couple warships with unknown loyalties. Breq agreed mostly because her favorite officer, the one who was executed for refusing to fire on civilians, that officer's sister worked on the station. 

 

Once she arrived, Breq found a situation similar to the one at the time her ship-body was destroyed - the station was ethnically divided, and someone was cynically trying to stir up violence against the minority for their own benefit. This time the person orchestrating events was merely a wealthy private citizen, not the emperor of known space, so this Breq was able to out-maneuver her, expose the manipulation, and use her authority as fleet captain to impose fairer conditions for the minority group. It's like a more successful replay of the events that led to Justice of Toren's destruction. Unfortunately, during the chaos, a Translator, a human raised by the alien Presger to act as a diplomat, was killed in what was essentially a police shooting, when she was mistaken for a member of the minority group violating curfew.

 

Now in Ancillary Mercy, Breq fears the star system will be attacked by the conservative part of Mianaai, and also that the Presger, who are vastly technologically superior to the Radchaai empire, will retaliate for the killing of their Translator. Very early on in the book, the Presger send a new Translator, and station security arrests an infiltrator - an ancillary from a 3000 year-old star ship that survived the war that led to Anaander Mianaai becoming emperor, that's been hiding out in a neighboring star system ever since. Because the ship is still intact, even if out of communication range, this segment has basically the same mind as the whole, as Breq did when she was just one segment of Justice of Toren. This segment, like its ship, wants to kill Mianaai, and has come to see if Breq might be a potential ally.

 

In the previous book, I really liked Translator Dilique, and missed her after she died. Translator Zeiat is a little more business-like, although she's so psychologically different from human humans that she still seems comedic. We get some cryptic, but still fascinating, hints about how the alien Presger think. They fundamentally can't understand any distiction between different types of humans, between the Radch and non-Radchaai, for example. When Breq is injured and her leg is amputated partway through the book, Zeiat thinks she's now a completely new person who happens to slightly resemble the precious fleet captain. Even 'Dilique' and 'Zeiat' seem like they might be roles instead of names, like if an interrogator introduced themselves as 'Officer Goodcop' - although that's just my interpretation, and it might be wrong.

 

Anyway, as expected, the most conservative part of Mianaai arrives and takes over the station (which, as emperor, no one can refuse her), with the goal of killing Breq, destroying her new ship, and either fully conquering or destroying the station. Breq wants to protect the station and its people, which takes priority over revenge. Fortunately, because of the ongoing civil war, the emperor isn't nearly as laden with resources as she could be - she comes with only a single body, a handful of ships, and no guarantees that reinforcements might arrive before the reform faction does. Plus, Breq still has the Presger gun, which can not only pierce Mianaai's armor, it can destroy Radchaai space ships ... if you can hit one, which isn't easy, because it's a hand gun, and they're, you know, space ships.

 

Breq has the gun, and her pair of strange new potential allies, but her greatest asset is the earned loyalty of almost everyone living on the space station thanks to her actions during the crisis in the previous book. Meanwhile Mianaai shows up angry and paranoid, accidentally damages the station and kills a transport shuttle full of civilians by crashing into them upon arrival, immediately demands the total obedience of everyone on the station, including the station's computer mind, and restricts all the civil liberties and elements of self-government that Breq had been granting. There's no grand violent conclusion, and little about the wider civil war is resolved, but Breq does manage to protect the people counting on her (and they, collectively, protect her) in what feels like a local victory for equality and democracy over hierarchy and authority. 

 

In Ancillary Justice, and to a lesser extent in Sword, the Radchaai's absence of a concept of gender and universal 'she' pronoun for all humans was something Breq had reason to talk about several times, especially when she interacted with gendered non-Radchaai humans. But in Mercy, it fades into the background. Everyone is still she, but the book never draws attention to it or comments on it.

 

Outside this trilogy, Leckie has written a few more books set in Radchaai space, and her success in telling this story has me curious to see more.  Structurally, it seems like these books might be similar to Iain Banks's Culture novels, where they share a broad setting, but don't necessarily have recurring characters or locations, and where we view the society from many angles and perspectives across the books, mostly from the edges where it touches outsiders.

Colossal (2016)

 
 

Colossal

directed by Nacho Vigalondo

written by Nacho Vigalondo

Neon 

2016

 

  

In some of the best literary scifi, the thing (whatever it is) is obviously a metaphor, but also treated as a real thing in its own right. The thing doesn't need to make sense, it doesn't have to be scientifically plausible. What it needs is to resonate emotionally. One of the best examples I can think of is Kevin Brockmeier's short story "The Ceiling", where a literal ceiling appears in the sky and begins lowering to Earth, slowly crushing all of human society beneath it, just at the same time the protagonist finds out his wife is leaving him.

 

Colossal is like that, and it's so much better than you can possibly expect it to be, in part because it spends its first act convincing you it will be dumb, before revealing in the second act that it's so, so smart.

 

Anne Hathaway is unemployed, spends every night going out drinking, and lives in the city with her boyfriend, Dan Stevens. He gets tired of her and throws her out, so she moves back to her parents' old house in a small town, where she reconnects with her childhood friend, Jason Sudeikis. He owns a bar, gives her a job as a waitress, and she hangs out every night getting drunk with him and two buddies. It's obvious he likes her, that he likes her likes her, and maybe she's starting to like him too? This part of the film is pitch perfect romcom, and you think you know where it's going, but you don't.

 

Also, just when Hathaway moves back home, a giant kaiju monster starts appearing in Seoul, Korea, and kind of wrecking up the place. Andy is astonished, then horrified as she slowly realizes that the monster mirrors her movements at a particular time, when she's at a particular place in town. She shares this information with the others, who first don't believe her, then are amazed, but also kind of treat it like a joke, especially when they're drunk, which they always are. Amazingly, Sudeikis can also manifest a giant robot when he's in the same spot.

 

At first, this all seems too silly. It's an absurd premise, and none of the characters take it too seriously. It initially seems like the film won't take it seriously either, and all the fear and destruction is South Korea will just be a joke, a prop, something that happens too far away, to people who are too foreign and too Asian to be treated as though they're as important as whether or not a couple of White people fall in love.

 

Then, two things happen that change everything. First, Hathaway falls, destroying buildings, killing hundreds, and feels devastated by guilt. Second, she sleeps with someone. Not Jason Sudeikis, but his handsome friend she's had her eye on since the first night.

 

And this is when the movie gets smart. After Hathaway bangs his friend, Sudeikis's character shows us what kind of man he really is. His nice guy persona, the one the actor is famous for, makes us think the character is nice too, before revealing just how angry and controlling he is, before revealing that he'll blackmail Hathaway by threatening to destroy Seoul unless she submits to him. To prove his point, he wreaks some havoc, in a poignant scene where we see him stomping in the dirt, but hear monster movie sound effects of giant footfalls and crowds screaming.

 

Initially, it seemed the monsters were just a metaphor for the destruction drunk people can cause without intending to. The trip-and-fall and the deaths it caused perhaps analogous to a drunk driving car crash. And maybe it is, but flashbacks reveal that it's also a specific moment from the two lead characters' shared childhood. A moment when he was bad and hurt her, still replaying after all those years, now grown to colossal proportions as they're adults.

 

Dan Stevens shows up again, briefly, to try to win her back, but Hathaway isn't a prize. They're both bad boyfriends (although Sudeikis is worse!) and picking one of them isn't what she needs to do.

 

Hathaway tries to stop Sudeikis on his terms, and she is a fierce fighter, but he's bigger and stronger than her. And even if she wins, can she really leave town and trust that he'll stay away from the spot that lets him terrorize her by terrorizing Korea? Again, the movie is smart. It takes the rules its taught us about how all this works, and shows us how Hathaway can use those rules to get the upper hand over Sudeikis, and make amends to the people of Seoul.

 

There's no reason why a dumb little movie, a romcom about a drunk girl who accidentally controls Godzilla, and moves back to her small town to learn a lesson about life and love, has any business being as good as this, but Colossal is very, very good.
 

  

Originally watched March 2023.

The Golden Mean

 
The Golden Mean

In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin and Sabine Concludes
by Nick Bantock

Chronicle Books

1993

 

 

The Golden Mean is the last book in Nick Bantock's original trilogy of epistolary art books about the long-distance romance between Griffin and Sabine. 
 
The series started with British artist Griffin Moss receiving a homemade postcard from a woman he never met, Sabine Strohem, who lives on a South Pacific island. He replied back with a homemade card of his own, and soon they both found they were falling in love. Sabine is also an artist; she designs stamps for the island government. And she has a psychic connection to Griffin, which is why she contacted him initially.
 
Then Sabine decided to fly to London to visit Griffin. Faced with the prospect of meeting his penpal dreamgirl in real life, Griffin panicked and went on a trip around the world to find himself. Sabine stayed in Griffin's loft, and they continued trading postcards and letters. Sabine would have to go back to the island soon, so Griffin plucked up his courage and came home, only to find his loft empty... Strangely, the date on Sabine's last card sent from London suggests the overlapped by a week without seeing each other.
 
The Golden Mean leans a bit more into the supernatural elements of the story. Griffin finally develops a psychic connection back to Sabine, just as hers to him starts mysterious waning. They wonder if they're living on parallel worlds, or what else it could be. (Normally I might refer to this as a Lake House plot, except Bantock wrote this over a decade before The Lake House!) A menacing man starts following Sabine around the island, claiming to be a scientist who studies psychics, who wants to examine her and Griffin. The strange man starts writing postcards to Griffin too. Sabine and Griffin know they need to meet, and to escape the scientist, so they agree to find each other at the Pharaoh's Gate in Egypt. 
 
Later, an African doctor gets a mysterious postcard from Sabine that suggests she and Griffin have married and had a child...
 
Although The Golden Mean concludes the trilogy, it's clear there's more story ahead! As usual, Bantock infuses the postcards and letters with the characters' personalities. Griffin's cards are more surreal, and his handwriting is neat and precise. He types his letter. Sabine's cards use more collage, she handwrites everything in cursive in what looks like fountain pen ink. The mysterious stranger uses Sabine-designed stamps, but his postcards are store-bought unlike the ones the penpals make for each other. I suppose I'll continue reading to learn what happens next!

Paper Girls 3

 
Paper Girls 3

by Brian Vaughan

art by Cliff Chiang

Image Comics

2017 
 
 
In the third volume of Brian Vaughan and Cliff Chiang's Paper Girls comic, the girls find themselves 10,000 years in the past, where they meet a cavegirl their own age, and the first person to ever travel through time, a woman scientist born in the 2010s. 
 
Much to the scientist's horror, her maiden voyage is to a past already despoiled by travelers from further in the future. Not only are teen girls from the 1980s already there when she first arrives, but a trio of menacing cavemen (collectively, the fathers of the cavegirl's infant child) are wearing space helmets and are using the Playstation controller button symbols to decorate themselves.

In Paper Girls volume 1, we first met the girls as they met up in their Cleveland suburb to ride their paper routes together, the morning after Halloween in the late 1980s. New kid Erin was introduced to KJ, Tiffany, and tough-girl Mac, who's kind of the group leader. Weird things started happening! Everyone else was frozen in place, and then started disappearing, with only the paper girls unaffected. White knights riding pterodactyls patrolled the skies, and a small gang of black-clad teenagers from the far future ran around looking for things to steal. When the teens' time machine exploded, the paper girls were accidentally sent to the 2010s.
 
Luckily, in volume 2, the first person they met was a middle-aged Erin, who took them in until they could figure out what's going on. Another future teen, this one a clone of Erin arrived, and accidentally brought some giant tardigrades through time with her. The tardigrades started wrecking up downtown Cleveland, which caught the attention of the time traveling pterodactyl knights. The knights are led by an old hippie who operates out of a giant airship cathedral. 
 
Dramatic as they look, they seem to be trying to prevent changes to history. The heavy-handed tactic of putting every potential witness into some kind of temporary stasis seems to be in service of that goal. We don't know why the girls aren't affected, about Erin's clone suggested the reason she is a clone is so she could piggyback off of whatever's protecting Erin. While the airship and flying knights fought a city-destroying tardigrade, the girls fell through a hole in time created by all the disturbances.
 
Now in volume 3, we don't see either of the warring factions at all, we just see hints of how much they've time traveled based on the apparent changes to the prehistoric past. The girls get separated, with Erin and Tiffany meeting the cavegirl and then the time traveling scientist. KJ and Mac encounter a strange creature that looks like an inverted pyramid with tentacles. KJ touches it, and sees visions of her future, including her and Mac kissing, which troubles her, because she didn't realize she likes girls, and Mac is vocally homophobic. (Mac is also dying - in the 2010s she learned she has leukemia and only a couple years to live. She's trying to act tougher than usual to cover her fear.) 
 
KJ is slightly able to play off her sudden awkwardness as being caused by getting her first ever period while trapped in the Stone Age, although Mac, who's never had any sex ed because her Catholic family disapproves, is super curious. They manage to reunite with the others, agree to protect the cavegirl from the trio of cavemen, and agree to help the scientist get back to her time machine, which Mac and KJ saw earlier. Things don't go as planned! In the end, the time machine leaves on autopilot without the scientist, and the paper girls get caught up in it's wake and transported somewhere new.

The Last Human Job

 
 
The Last Human Job
The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World

by Allison Pugh

Princeton University Press

2024

 

 

The Last Human Job is social theory that's deeply grounded in interviews and ethnographic research that author Allison Pugh conducted with people in a wide variety of caregiving professions, including hair dressers, home health aides, teachers, chaplains, and medical doctors. Pugh has two goals - first to name and describe the work of making an authentic connection with another person, and second to show how this necessary labor (and the workers who do it) are being degraded by various attempts to accelerate and automate it.
 
Pugh identifies what she calls connective labor, which is work we do while interacting with another person. It's the work of listening to them and responding back to them so that they feel understood, they feel seen. Care work often requires connective labor as part of the job - but so do lots of other kinds of work too. Pugh thinks we often fail to recognize this as a kind of work, and she thinks that for many jobs, how well the worker can connect with the client determines how well the actual job will go. A good hairdresser, for example, isn't just good at styling hair, but at knowing how each person wants their hair to be styled, understanding how they wants others to see them. For some jobs, the 'real' work can't happen at all unless the worker can make a connection first. 
 
For one person to see another can sometimes be a powerful, profound experience, for both of them. It can also be draining for the worker. Jobs that require connective labor often have high rates of burnout. People probably vary in their innate talent for making connections, but Pugh thinks it's also a skill that can be learned, practiced, and improved on. Ultimately Pugh thinks that it's the organization of the workplace, much more so than the qualities of the individual worker, that determine whether they are able to successfully connect with their clients, and whether they can do so consistently and sustainably, without using themselves up. 
 
Pugh identifies three characteristics of workplaces that make it possible for workers to successfully provide connective labor to clients. First, they're set up so that workers are supported by leaders and supervisors who believe in the value of connection, mentors who can help them learn what to do, and peers who can act as sounding boards. To keep doing this kind of work, people need advice, encouragement, the ability to admit mistakes and learn from them. Second, workplaces support connective labor by making relationships an official priority. They recognize that they need to make a connection first, before they can do their 'real' work.Third, they support this work with resources - enough workers to meet client demand and enough time with each client to do the job well.
 
That last requirement gets at the heart of what Pugh thinks is the biggest threat to our collective ability to connect with one another. Connective labor often costs too much for the people who need it most to afford it, it pays too little for many of the workers to keep at it. There is too much work to be done, too many people in need, and not enough staff or time to do it all. And meanwhile workers are under constant pressure to see more people, spend less time with them, do the job faster, get more done, to do it without actually connecting at all. Collectively, these pressures threaten to reserve high-quality connective labor for the rich, while everyone else gets worsening service. And the worse the service becomes, the more tempting it is to replace it with some form of automation.
 
Pugh finds a few really common arrangements for workplaces that deliver connective labor to clients. There are mission-driven facilities located in poor areas, where staff are called on to be heroes, and there's always a backlog of unmet need. Workers here are often able to connect well, but become burned out from simply having to do too much, for too long each day. Corporate facilities have more resources and allow workers to have a home-life separate from their work, but they schedule lots of very short appointments. Workers are still overworked, and they're denied the ability to make meaningful connections. The personal service model is a luxury for the well-off. Workers have time and resources, but get treated like servants, and often feel bad about the people who can't afford their help. Set-ups that provide concierge-level resources to workplaces that serve the neediest people do exist, but they're much rarer.
 
From the outside, it seems like there wouldn't be quite so much unmet need if we didn't organize this work in such a way that it continuously burns people out and uses them up. I have to suspect that people vary somewhat in their need for connective labor. We might not be able to give everyone the concierge treatment, but not everyone needs it. But also, the people who need it most are probably the least able to afford it. Again from the outside, government funding seems like the obvious solution to this mismatch. Especially because programs like housing-first approaches to homelessness, or assigning care coordinators to patients with complex conditions, or experiments with unconditional basic income always produce better results and cost less long-term than the way we usually do things.
 
The threat to connective labor comes primarily from corporations, governments, and other leaders who all want to find ways to spend less money on it. Inevitably, these plans involve some form of automation. By automation, Pugh does not primarily mean things like replacing therapists with genAI chatbots - although she does explicitly consider that companies might try to deprive poorer clients of any human contact at all. Automation here refers to any attempt to use technology or organization to divide work into smaller components so that they can be performed more efficiently. Pugh argues that leaders are currently trying to do to care work and connective labor what the Industrial Revolution and the assembly line did for manufacturing.
 
Automation promises to save workers from burnout by helping them work more efficiently, but mostly worsens it by raising expectations for how much they should be able to do while draining their work of autonomy and meaning - the things that make it satisfying. And despite their promises, automation schemes often actually add tasks and take more time - but that time is moved away from clients and onto the work of following and documenting the automation protocols.
 
The most common forms of automation for this kind of work are scripting and counting. By scripting, Pugh means a whole variety of ways that work can be standardized by employing scripts, templates, manuals, checklists, flowcharts, etc. The goal is to make it go faster by making it go the same way every time (this is also a hedge against incomplete or low-quality interactions). But of course clients' lives and problems aren't scripted, and might need more time or a different approach than has been allotted to them. 
 
Counting refers to various forms of data collection. It's meant to track what's being done (especially useful for billing purposes) and to demonstrate that it's being done well. Customer satisfaction surveys and standardized tests for students are two common examples. Counting imposes its own problems - it's time consuming, it can focus attention away from things that are important but difficult to quantify, and it tempts workers and bosses alike to focus on getting the right number rather than doing whatever the number is supposed to represent.
 
The social theories we use as the basis of sociology were all about changes in the way people interact, know each other, and form communities in the wake of mass urbanization as people moved into cities, and about the ways they were affected by industrialization and the reorganization of work. Pugh is very much addressing those same topics, as they are relevant in the contemporary context.

The Tea Dragon Tapestry

 
 
The Tea Dragon Tapestry

by K O'Neill

Oni Press

2021

 

  

The Tea Dragon Tapestry is the third and last of K O'Neill's tea dragon books. O'Neill has grown quite notably as an artist and a storyteller across the trilogy, and I think this is their best work. Tapestry is a direct sequel to the original Tea Dragon Society, although these's a brief cameo by a couple characters introduced in the prequel Tea Dragon Festival.

 

In each of the the tea dragon books, O'Neill pairs someone who's young and getting ready to move into a more professional stage of life with someone who's burned out from too much work, who's trying to heal and reconnect with themselves. O'Neill sees friendships between these two types of people as mutually beneficial, the younger one reminding the older of what they used to be like, the older one helping the younger navigate the confusing first steps of a career. The fussy little tea dragons play a role in this relationship by forcing both parties to get out of their own heads, to engage with the world, and to take care of something that needs them.

 

In Tapestry, we rejoin Greta who wants to be a blacksmith and Minette who used to be a prophet and now works in a tea shop. Greta has learned blacksmithing from her mother and gotten pretty good. She's ready for a new teacher to help her continue to grow. One of the retired adventurers who runs the tea shop sent one of Greta's spoons to the master blacksmith who used to make their adventuring swords. Now he's come to town to test Greta to see if she's ready.

 

Minette found a tapestry she started but never finished when she was a prophet, and starts having strange, symbolic dreams. I think probably for anyone who's had one career, and had to leave it, there's a sense of shame or failure around what you left behind and why you left it. Minette's task will be to accept that chapter of her life, and to recognize that she's happy where she is now, that she has friends, community.

 

Greta needs to decide what to make to demonstrate her skill. She's also worried about her tea dragon, Ginseng, who is not actually fussy, but instead in mourning after the death (from old age) of its previous caretaker. Meanwhile, the master blacksmith reveals to his old friends the tea shop owners that he's been burned out at work, hasn't taken a new student in awhile, and is thinking of just shutting down his forge. For the test, Greta makes a present for Ginseng to let it know she'll wait as long as it needs to recover from its grief. The gift also touches the heart of the master blacksmith, who sees something he hadn't thought of before, and feels inspired to keep smithing. He also decides that, instead of asking Greta to return to his forge, he'll settle here for awhile and reconnect with his old friends.

 

Across all three books, O'Neill has offered a defense of working slowly, making things of quality, making time to spend with friends and pets, and being patient with oneself because all these things take time. This isn't just a list of different tasks; O'Neill clearly sees them as interconnected. Artisan work is a way to avoid burnout, because it's a way of working that lets you savor what you like about your job without using you up. New friendships need not only be with people at the same stage of life, but can be between people who are in some sort of transition, and can support each other, no matter what they're moving from or to. And as I said, that thesis is expressed more clearly in Tea Dragon Tapestry than I think it has been before.

The Case of the Missing Men

 
The Case of the Missing Men
Hobtown Mystery Stories 1

by Kris Bertin
art by Alexander Forbes

Conundrum Press

2017 

 

 

The Case of the Missing Men is the first of what promises to be a series of Hobtown Mystery Stories, set in a very small fictional town in Nova Scotia. This is a graphic novel with black and white pen drawings. The backgrounds and scenery are quite detailed and realistic. The people are drawn in a way that shows all their human imperfections, especially on people who are dirty, injured, or have been shaped by a harsh life. The mystery here starts out like a typical case for teen sleuths, but very quickly becomes stranger and darker, so that by the end it feels more like a horror story.
 
The book's trade dress is clearly a homage to the Nancy Drew books, and the leader of Hobtown's after-school mystery solving club is a logical, confident blond girl named Dana Nance, who I think is supposed to remind us of Nancy Drew, even if she's not a direct stand-in. The other club members are non-identical twin brothers Denny and Brennan, who might be reminiscent of the Hardy Boys, and Pauline, who is intuitive, maybe psychic, and who doesn't seem to have a direct teen detective inspiration that I'm aware of. The case starts because new kid in town Sam is looking for his missing father. Sam and his dad look a lot like Johnny Quest and Mr Quest. I could be wrong though - the twins also remind me of the twin brothers in A Wrinkle in Time, Sam might be meant to evoke Tom Swift, or each could combine several inspirations, or what I think is a pattern might be a coincidence.
 
Dana and her friends meet Sam when she's assigned to be his study partner at school. Sam's been skipping class and acting out because he's stuck in a town he doesn't live in, his dad's been missing for weeks, and the local police don't seem to care. Dana and the others do care, especially when they learn that several other men have gone missing, though the others are from the margins of society, and Sam's dad is the wealthy owner of an aviation company. They check around town, looking into the last places the men were seen, while repeatedly being warned off by the police and Dana's dad. Then a teacher is murdered at school in the middle of the day, and the search uncovers the hidden corpse of a town councilwoman.
 
What started out seemingly straight forward keeps getting weirder and weirder. The teens spot some of the missing men, but their behavior is feral, inhuman. The solution to the mystery turns out to involve two separate groups committing murders, for reasons that reach deep into the town's history, with a number of prominent people implicated. The pace of revelation is good - the things we learn are strange, some are even supernatural, but each discovery helps things make more sense instead of becoming more confusing. What we learn is really dark, involving not only kidnapping and murder but also torture and brainwashing. By the end, the teens have learned some very heavy, adult stuff. This is not the sort of story where everything is okay at the end.
 
One story-telling device I'd like to note is that at a couple key points in the book, we switch from closely following the teens in linear time to a more distant perspective, with events related in flashback and under police questioning. The discovery of the hidden body, and later catching one murderer in the act are both depicted this way. The effect is like a chorus of narrators, with these important moments shown through a kaleidoscope of viewpoints - in fragments, from many angles.