If you know who Jack Hawksmoor of the Authority is, you will get some of the vibe here. San Francisco is making its own superheroes, to help combat corruption, takeover and neglect of its internal systems, and organised crime control of finance. However, it needs assistants, and ends up possessing those bodies, with their physical forms being destroyed.

Other cities are on a similar path, by the end, without the superhero manifestations. This is superhero in the Authority sense, too.

The protagonist is an aging music club owner, deeply in debt to his mob, who, of course, has a thing for the singer in one of his support acts. The problem is, that City does not trust her.

http://superprose.blogspot.com/2006/0... ( )