Policing Utopia by Alex Mell-Taylor
$18.00
Three lives intertwine in a fractured future America where a murder investigation exposes the fragile line between freedom and control.
Description
Utopia, it turns out, comes with fine print.
In the year 2101, America has splintered into competing visions of the future—each promising freedom, each hiding its own machinery of control. Across this fractured landscape, three lives move on a collision course.
Three-Seven is an indentured servant trapped inside a corporate barony, where survival means obedience—and rebellion could cost her everything, including her children.
Rowan wanders the Restoration, a loose, quasi-anarchist society built on the ruins of the old world, carrying grief that refuses to settle after the loss of her son.
And Calisto, a community repair specialist, is assigned what should be a simple task: solve a murder.
Except someone doesn’t want it solved.
As Calisto digs deeper, the case begins to mutate—into something larger, darker, and far more dangerous. Threads of deception, identity, and buried history twist together, exposing a conspiracy that cuts to the heart of the Restoration itself.
Because even in a society built on ideals of freedom, power doesn’t disappear.
It just learns to wear a friendlier face.
Policing Utopia is a sharp, cerebral sci-fi thriller that asks uncomfortable questions: Who defines justice in a world without rulers? What does freedom really cost? And how thin is the line between liberation… and control?
Bleak, thoughtful, and eerily plausible, this is speculative fiction with teeth—and a conscience.
Book Details
Author: Alex Mell-Taylor
Format: Paperback
Publication Date: March 31, 2026
ISBN: 9798988038597
ZiggiC –
I am biased, I’ll admit, as I have known Alex as a friend for many years now, but that only contributes to how proud I am of her work here. The world-scape she has created in this novel has so much depth and care, and the characters are so much better developed for this. Much care and respect is clearly visible in the backstory and foundation of the Restoration, and an understanding for how the internet and AI contribute to the extrapolation of how the COAR is foundational to how this future society experience the world and interact with its history that stems from our own. One of my most appreciated mentions was a passing reference to Moshup, the Aquina-Wampanoag founding entity, a giant who stomped the island today known as Martha’s Vineyard into existence. Such a capitalist and colonial “LITERAL” footprint made for a perfect location for this future-speculative critique on the entire capital-establishment. And as someone of Turtle-Island indigenous descent myself, I really appreciated Alex’s choice to strip the land to her original caretakers’ story, and not give more than a passing thought to the hegemonic corporate overlords who corrupted her and drowned those shores.
The first chapter from Three-Seven’s perspective really grabs the reader’s attention with the dramatic event of a hostile takeover/coup and its subsequent chaos that find their way into the murder-mystery and future-true-crime scene that this book plays out. That mixed with the social-critique on the way authority would try to regain a foothold on an unsuspecting anarchic social structure was very entertaining to watch play out.
The story is very well executed, with a perfect amount of seemingly minor details that allow the reader to speculate on potential outcomes and remember those callbacks in the perfect moment as events play out to a satisfying end.
I really enjoyed Alex Mell-Taylor’s previous work, having given a rave-review to The Bubble as well, and will be looking forward to any and all future projects!