Terence M. Green’s new novel, Blue Limbo, gets off to a fast start. When we first meet Green’s protagonist, Toronto police detective Mitch Helwig, he’s blowing up a drug kingpin’s warehouse singlehandedly. The opening scene is as action-packed as any Hollywood shoot-’em-up, but it also sets in motion a story that will have Helwig paying a heavy price for his early and largely unauthorized heroics.

Blue Limbo is set in the 21st century and the plot has the futuristic gadgets to prove it – like the Honda skimmer hovercraft Helwig uses in the opening scene to make his entrance and successful escape from the designated target. Later, Helwig chases down some muggers and figures out they’re lying by employing “the Barking Dog” – a foolproof lie detector conveniently attached to the body of the interrogator rather than the person being interrogated. Finally, to teach the muggers a lesson, Helwig burns off a couple of their bionic limbs with his Bausch & Lomb hand-laser. No legal fuss or muss.

James Bond hardware aside, Helwig is a cop with the kind of problems any contemporary fan of detective stories would recognize. His partner has been killed, his work is demoralizing, his superiors are corrupt, his wife is having an affair with her slick boss, and Helwig is starting to take the law into his own hands. In fact, it’s only his relationships with his 84-year-old father and 11-year-old daughter that are keeping him from going completely and irretrievably over the edge.

One of the more intriguing elements of Blue Limbo is how Green, who’s best known as a science fiction writer, tries to mix genres – in this case sci-fi with a standard police thriller. Unfortunately, this is also at the heart of the trouble with Blue Limbo, which ends up selling both genres short. As a thriller, Green’s narrative is surprisingly slow in establishing who the villain is, and even when the villain is introduced – with only about 50 pages left in the novel – he isn’t much more than the puppet of some unidentified higher-up.

As for the sci-fi plot twist, it involves a controversial new medical technique that allows someone who has died to be revived and kept alive for several weeks. Everything the patient – actually that’s ex-patient – sees is blue, hence the book’s title. This is the kind of imaginative leap that raises all kinds of dramatic possibilities and ethical questions – for instance, is it right to bring someone back from the dead, knowing they will die again in a short time? But Green just ends up using it as a quick and easy way for his hero to determine who is trying to kill him and his loved ones. Add to this a predictable conclusion and a slapped-on romantic subplot and the result is a novel that proposes interesting problems but falls back on formulaic solutions.