Zoey Is Too Drunk for This Dystopia

Zoey Ashe is twenty-three and runs the criminal empire her father left her. The staff around her know the business far better than she does, and they keep steering her. She likens the arrangement to piloting a battleship with her body lashed to the propeller.

Tabula Ra$a is in the middle of its yearly music festival. A drunken riot reliably follows the festival, and this year something far worse is stirring beneath both. Zoey has never faced a threat so large or so strange.

She must handle it in a city where every camera broadcasts live. A watching crowd rates her performance as events unfold, so each decision she makes is public.

This is the third Zoey Ashe novel by Jason Pargin. It is near-future satire with a comic tone, funny about technology and serious about what a permanent audience does to people. The setting is a surveilled city where nothing goes unseen, and the mood is chaotic and fast, with the humor sitting on top of real stakes.