Introduction: Talbot Singh is an “assist,” whose job is “to make sure that when things happened to a family, those things went as well as could be expected.” Talbot has his hands full when a jeweler, Jay Mill, is shot to death in his store, but, since nothing was stolen, Talbot suspects that Mill was the target of a professional hit. In the best hard-boiled tradition, Talbot’s involvement rubs the official investigators the wrong way, forcing him to do his own discreet digging into the murder. But while the central concept is familiar, the setting is not. The killing takes place in an unnamed multilevel city connected by thousands of elevators; status is determined by the level on which one lives, and the cost of traveling to one of the top levels is half a year’s wages for the average resident....