“The Regular” by Ken. Liu - A Short Story - 2014 - included in The Long List Anthology More Stories from the Hugo Award Nomination List

“The Regular” by Ken. Liu - A Short Story - 2014 - included in The Long List Anthology More Stories from the Hugo Award Nomination List - 2015

“The Regular” opens in the apartment of an expensive prostitute, she is awaiting the arrival of a new client she hopes will become a regular customer. Her parents are divorced, her mother is Chinese.  She goes by “Jasmine”. 

When the client arrives, Jasmine likes his looks, he looks safe, like a married man looking for no complications, well dressed like he is on a date. She hopes he will become a “regular”.  He ends up shooting her twice through the heart, cutting out and keeping one of her eyes. Before he goes he searches her apartment and finds $60,000.  He has done this numerous prior times.

Her mother hires a private detective, Ruth Davis, to find her killer when the police fail. The killer left a burner phone in a dumpster nearby with ties to Chinese gangsters to make it seem they killed her to eliminate competition for the massage parlors they operate.

In this world people have regulators installed in them to control their  emotions.  Legs and arms can be made much stronger by implementing bionic augmentations.  Ruth Davis has these, making her quite strong for a 49 year old woman.

We learn more the killer, he calls himself “The Watcher”.  We learn why he takes one eye from his victims.  He travels around after making a few kills in a city.

The close of the story is very scary. The way the killer is found is just so brilliant.

This is a marvelous work, taking us deeply into a city no too much different from a big American city.  There is a lot of details about different sorts of prostitutes and clients.

“Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an American author of speculative fiction. He has won the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, as well as top genre honors in Japan, Spain, and France, among other countries.

Liu’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, is the first volume in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, the Dandelion Dynasty, in which engineers play the role of wizards. His debut collection, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, has been published in more than a dozen languages. A second collection, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, followed. He also penned the Star Wars novel The Legends of Luke Skywalker.

Many of his stories have been adapted for the screen. Recent projects include “The Hidden Girl,” under development by FilmNation Entertainment as a TV series; “The Message,” under development by 21 Laps and FilmNation Entertainment; “Good Hunting,” adapted as an episode in season one of Netflix’s breakout adult animated series Love, Death + Robots; and AMC’s Pantheon, with Craig Silverstein as executive producer, adapted from an interconnected series of short stories by Liu.

Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Liu worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. He frequently speaks at conferences and universities on a variety of topics, including futurism, cryptocurrency, history of technology, bookmaking, narrative futures, and the mathematics of origami.

Liu is also the translator for Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, Hao Jingfang’s “Folding Beijing” and Vagabonds, Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide, as well as the editor of Invisible Planets and Broken Stars, anthologies of contemporary Chinese science fiction.

Liu lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.”

From https://kenliu.name/

For sure I want to read more by Ken Liu

Mel Ulm