This was the first SPFBOX finalist that was announced, and since I already had it on my kindle, with plans to read it because I had stumbled upon it and thought it sounded interesting, I decided to move it up on my TBR!
Two years after a devastating defeat in the decade-long Spore War, the island nation of Hōppon and its capital city of Neo Kinoko are occupied by invading Coprinian forces. Its fungal citizens are in dire straits, wracked by food shortages, poverty and an influx of war refugees. Even worse, the corrupt occupiers exploit their power, hounding the native population.
As a winter storm looms over the metropolis, NKPD homicide detective Henrietta Hofmann begrudgingly partners up with mushroom-headed patrol officer Koji Nameko to investigate the mysterious murders of fungal and half-breed children. Their investigation drags them deep into the seedy underbelly of a war-torn city, one brimming with colonizers, criminal gangs, racial division and moral decay.
In order to solve the case and unravel the truth, Hofmann must challenge her past and embrace fungal ways. What she and Nameko uncover in the midst of this frigid wasteland will chill them to the core, but will they make it through the storm alive?
This is the story of Henrietta Hofmann, a homicide detective in the city of Neo Kinoko. Neo Kinoko is the capital city of the island nation of Hōppon (Pretty Much Japan), which was fairly recently occupied by the nation of Coprinia (Pretty Much Britain) after a drawn out war. The fungal people of Hōppon are suffering from food shortages and poverty, but most recently, a number of fungal children have gone missing, and they have been showing up dead and dismembered. Hofmann teams up with Nameko Koji, the one Hōpponese officer in the NKPD, and together they attempt to solve the murder case and find the other missing children.
This was a really interesting book. It is somewhat like a noir detective novel, with mushroom people. Everything in Hōppon is fungus, not just the people. The plastic, the leather, the firearms… everything is fungal, and Henrietta Hofmann, recently of Coprinia, is mycophobic. Nonetheless, she teams up with Nameko and tries her best to find the missing children, and to find out what is going on.
I started off not really liking Hofmann, but she grew on me as the book went on. I suppose that I started liking her more as she grew and changed as a character. The Hofmann from the end of the book is quite different from the one at the beginning, and I really did enjoy the process that got her there. I think I came to respect her just how Nameko did over the course of the book.
The world itself was also really interesting. The idea that the fungals had their own mycelium network that they could communicate (to a point) over was really interesting. The differences in Fungal and Human cultures and how those differences could be mirrored in our own world made Neo Kinoko seem more easy to imagine for me.
Hofmann’s favorite genre of music, Pilzrock, was a neat little addition to the story, because each of the pilzrock songs or artists were named after another author or their characters. It was like having little easter eggs in there that I got a little chuckle from. It wasn’t the only thing in the book that seemed familiar to me in a musical sense. Here’s me at 3 in the morning listening to one of my favorite chill/ambient albums and reading this book, attempting to fall asleep:
chapter title: world of sleepers
me: hmm, well I wonder if that has any correlation to literally the album and song that I am currently listening to at this very moment…
(it did)
But anyway, this book was a great read, and I quite liked it from start to finish. Similar musical taste and similar Canadianness aside, I think I will read more from this author as soon as I can! 9/10 stars!~
superstardrifter 
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