The Water Knife

By: Paolo Bacigalupi

Narrated by: Almarie Guerra

Paolo Bacigalupi, New York Times best-selling author and National Book Award finalist, dives once again into our uncertain future with his first thriller for adults since his multi-award-winning debut phenomenon The Windup Girl.

In the American Southwest, Nevada, Arizona, and California skirmish for dwindling shares of the Colorado River. Into the fray steps Angel Velasquez, detective, leg breaker, assassin, and spy. A Las Vegas water knife, Angel "cuts" water for his boss, Catherine Case, ensuring that her lush, luxurious arcology developments can bloom in the desert, so the rich can stay wet while the poor get nothing but dust.

When rumors of a game-changing water source surface in drought-ravaged Phoenix, Angel is sent to investigate. There he encounters Lucy Monroe, a hardened journalist with no love for Vegas and every reason to hate Angel, and Maria Villarosa, a young Texas refugee who survives by her wits and street smarts in a city that despises everything she represents.

With bodies piling up, bullets flying, and Phoenix teetering on collapse, it seems like California is making a power play to monopolize the life-giving flow of a river. For Angel, Lucy, and Maria, time is running out, and their only hope for survival rests in each other's hands. But when water is more valuable than gold, alliances shift like sand, and the only thing for certain is that someone will have to bleed if anyone hopes to drink.

©2015 Paolo Bacigalupi (P)2015 Audible Inc.

Critic reviews

"[A]fresh, genre-bending thriller....Bacigalupi weaves an engrossing tale all his own, crackling with edgy style." ( Los Angeles Times)

"An ambitious, genre-dissolving thriller and a timely cautionary tale....this epic, visionary novel should appeal to a wide audience." ( Publishers Weekly)

"There is a savage beauty to the novel, which makes it one of the best books of 2015 I have read so far." ( SFF World)

Totally engrossing

Plausible future disaster for the American Southwest. Intense, fast moving plot. Great aration. A real winner!!

Kept me up way past my bedtme

Any additional comments?

Paolo Bacigalupi is my biggest literary crush: His world-building is wholly and uncomfortably plausible and he's unflinching in following the concepts through, even if it does occasionally involve being incredibly mean to his very captivating characters. I still feel like I want to reach through the veils of fiction and bring Angel and Lucy and Maria over to my house for a long cool drink of water and as many showers as they want.

This is a gripping, scary book that led me to neglect all sorts of other important things (like sleep) until it was done. The level of violence is high enough to skirt the edges of the pornographic but it doesn't quite go there; you won't sleep easy, though.

I noted the narrator's occasional unusual pronunciation but it didn't worry me as it seems to have worried some other reviewers - I live very far away from the south western US and I have no idea what a "correct" accent sounds like. I did enjoy her soft Spanish lilt and her absolutely superb characterisation.

Questions left unanswered...Perhaps a Sequel?

After loving the Ship Breaker books and some of the author's short stories, I was afraid that he had lost his edge with the overly-preachy "Doubt Factory." But the author is at his best when he SHOWS you the mistakes humankind is making rather than TELLS you, and this book passes that test with flying colors. Bacigalupi writes about a dystopian future that could easily occur within a decade of today, and uses mostly technology that already exists or will within the decade His human characters that are motivated by drives and desires that are easily understandable by today's men and women.The 3 narrators were all excellent and worked well together.

One small defect IMO was some of the graphic violence. Although well-explained...'live by the gun, die by the gun'...when the author was describing the images of the men who had been tortured to death, it seemed a bit over-the-top. If the author was trying to get the point across that these characters had become immune to normal feelings of horror by the cesspool in which they lived, all I can see is that he certainly succeeded. Enough questions were left open-ended that I foresee, and certainly HOPE to see, a sequel. If you liked the Ship Breaker books or the Wind-Up Girl, this is a read for you!

The book really took off around the half-way point

I really enjoyed the Water Knife but the first half, I really didn't connect much with the characters or where the book was going. Somewhere around the middle that changed. The book exploded and the story and characters really began to take shape. It's a tough book...well written about tough people in really tough times. It weaves between the characters and it left you guessing all the way until the end. The narration was very well done. Almarie's portrayal of voices was quite believable.

Uncannily accurate

This story is quite possibly our future. The author seems to of done his homework on this one and it doesn't bode well for those of us living living it.