"It’s late Thursday night, and Inspector Ross Carver is at a crime scene in one of the city’s last luxury homes. The dead man on the floor is covered by an unknown substance that’s eating through his skin. Before Carver can identify it, six FBI agents burst in and remove him from the premises. He's pushed into a disinfectant trailer, forced to drink a liquid that sends him into seizures, and is shocked unconscious. On Sunday he wakes in his bed to find his neighbor, Mia—who he’s barely ever spoken to—reading aloud to him. He can’t remember the crime scene or how he got home; he has no idea two days have passed. Mia says she saw him being carried into their building by plainclothes police officers, who told her he’d been poisoned. Carver doesn’t really know this woman and has no way of disproving her, but his gut says to keep her close.

A mind-bending, masterfully plotted thriller—written in Moore's "lush, intoxicating style" (Justin Cronin)—that will captivate fans of Blake Crouch, China Miéville, and Lauren Beukes, The Night Market follows Carver as he works to find out what happened to him, soon realizing he's entangled in a web of conspiracy that spans the nation. And that Mia may know a lot more than she lets on. "

Acquired via LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program. (Unabridged on 8 CDs; read by James Patrick Cronin)

Ross Carver is a homicide detective in San Francisco. One night he and his partner are called to a crime scene in which a body is found, seemingly being eaten alive by some sort of poisonous substance. Before they can fully process the scene, they are whisked away by men in Hazmat suits and decontaminated without any explanation whatsoever. Several days later, Ross wakes up with absolutely no memory at all of the crime scene, but with his neighbor, Mia (whom he's never actually met before) beside his bed, taking care of him. As he struggles to come to terms with & tries to reconstruct the days missing from his memory, he also doesn't know whether or not to trust Mia. Is she really trying to help him or does she know more than she's letting on?

The first half of this novel really piqued my interest, and as a reader, you know some background that the main character does not. Yet you don't know the details behind what really happened, and you begin to gradually unravel things as the main character does. I liked that aspect of the book, and for the most part I thought it was written well. The story takes place in San Francisco, but it's a dark San Francisco, one that is similar to present day, but not exactly. In this novel's world, there is a dystopian feel, mixed with some science fiction elements and an overall "Big Brother" atmosphere. Much more of this comes to light in the second half of the novel, but at the same time, it starts to become a little confusing and maybe a little bit over the top. Some of the pieces of the plot, though interesting and intriguing, didn't seem to fit together quite right. The ending left me unsettled and a little bit creeped out.

I was not familiar with this author prior to reading this book. This is the third novel in a series of books by Jonathan Moore that are set in San Francisco, apparently each with a different "feel". Though I thought this one could've been tightened up quite a bit, I enjoyed it for the most part, enough so that I am interested in reading the previous two novels.

(*I received this as an audiobook directly through the publisher as part of LibraryThing's Early Reviewer program. The 8th and final disc was empty -- I had to get my hands on a written copy in order to finish the book.)