Help. I can't remember the title or author of this sci-fi trilogy

Cafe Society
1

I am trying to remember the name and author of a science fiction detective trilogy that I read sometime in the past 10 years.

The main character is a detective who uses meditation to solve cases. He lives in a city that moves slowly across the ground consuming matter and creating new buildings and items. At the tail end of the city everything decays back into the landscape. Early in the first novel the detective goes to the decaying area and meets a female teenager who becomes his partner throughout the rest of the trilogy. The female character reminds me of Lisbeth from “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”. socially withdrawn but good with technology. In the later novels the pair travel to another planet on a archaeological investigation involving alien buildings and technology. Other than that I don’t remember much about the plot. The books were alright, not great but good enough for bedtime reading.

Anybody have any clues?

C

2

That sounds familiar. Like I read an overview of it before but not the book. Maybe something by Barbara Hambly?

3

There’s a moving city in Inverted World by Christopher Priest, but there’s no detectives in it. There’s also a moving city and a detective in The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi, but it’s hard to tell if that’s the book you describe. There’s a series of books by Philip Reeve about moving cities:

There are various fictional works mentioned in this Wikipedia entry about moving cities:

4

Perhaps Pilgrimage by Drew Mendelson.

5

It’s not The Quantum Thief, unless the OP is misremembering the partnership. It does involve some detective work and a moving city, but I’m pretty sure that the book only recently came out and there are no sequels yet.