Everyone dreams of a residency permit in L.A. In this new world order, water companies operate like rogue states with private militias to guard aqueducts and keep out desperate refugees, especially Texans, whose state imploded after their water was cut off.

Then there’s wild card Maria Villarosa, a teen refugee desperate to escape the razor-wired, militia-patrolled border into a greener world. Moving through this derelict world of abandoned subdivisions, dust storms and shifting allegiances is Angel Velasquez, a water company assassin, or “Water Knife.” In the dying city of Phoenix, now a Third World outpost swarming with refugees, spies, narcos, hustlers and aid workers, he meets Lucy Monroe, a Pulitzer-winning journalist come to document the collapse and confront her own demons. where a William Mulholland-like patriarch plots to bring Owens Valley water south, “The Water Knife” is set in a parched Southwest about 15 minutes into the future ruled by the “Queen of the Colorado.” Her Machiavellian schemes make L.A.’s historic water grab look like a kid stealing candy. Reading Paolo Bacigalupi’s richly imagined novel “The Water Knife” brings to mind the movie “Chinatown.” Although one is set in the past and the other in a dystopian future, both are neo-noir tales with jaded antiheroes and ruthless kingpins who wield water as lethal weapons to control life - and mete out death.īut while “Chinatown” gave us a languorous L.A.

The water knife book