Kieran Shea

Well, at least the reader was great. I am honestly glad I didn’t spring for a hard copy of this one. If I had been reading the print version, I would have put it down after the first hundred pages. Early on, the author overuses a technique common to cyberpunk where there would be long tracts of technobabble, but unlike something like Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, it did not mix the tech speak with atmosphere or tie any of it into the plot at all. Thus, there are just long tracts of technobabble that do nothing but bloat the text.
It seems the author dips their toes in moments of erotic tension but never goes the distance when given the chance by the narrative. Going full body genre (graphic sex scenes) could have pumped some life into this very dead thing. The characters are cardboard either being ex-cop/ex-soldier bad-asses or bureaucratic assassins who are all completely stupid-evil. Even the “good guys” are of the same stripe and just not great people. It’s almost as if the author was trying for grimdark and just wound up in the land of cliché with zero feelings of any kind. The characters are all complete assholes and all a part of the same unjust, unfair system so why bother caring for any of these clones, yes, almost all are “genetically engineered”, so clones. Not even one chafes against the system, they are all so settled in and a part of the system that they all come off as fattened ticks. Even the sidekick, ex-cop Flynn, is determined to carry out his state-sanctioned suicide due to an incurable disease called “Depressis”. He’s as close as you get to someone rubbing up against the system the wrong way. He’s all better at the end anyway so that doesn’t even lead anywhere for the character but a “I got better” hackneyed character arc.
This novel is a typical cyberpunk dystopia with space travel focused on an action-hero protagonist and the text and story are as shallow as a Men’s Adventure paperback and should’ve been around a similar 125 pages or less.
The threat built up in the first half of the novel, “The Redhead with the neck-links”, is sniped by Koko when the final confrontation occurs at the two-thirds mark. Talk about anti-climactic ruining my little interest at that point in the story. Frankly, the actual threat in the form of the former friend turned bureaucrat, Delacompte, is not that interesting other than having the sole story function to get the whole stupid thing rolling in the first place.
There is a ray of hope for the author though. The final battle between Koko and Delacompte does have some vibrancy in the prose and relishes the gore of the battle. When Delacompte’s memory caps pop (sorry, a Total Recall movie reference but then again, everything in this book is from somewhere else) she suffers some ultimate pain as she remembers she murdered her child in service of her post-soldier career as a bureaucrat. Too bad the rest of the novel isn’t anywhere near as good.
The only redeeming quality of this book is the gore, and there is only one really good gore scene involving an exploding natural-born soccer star turned super-merc/assassin and the post-mortem biting and spitting out of her eyeball aside from the actual finale. On a related note, there is so much biting out of the eyeballs in this story that it just gets silly. I think the author thought they were writing a grimdark cyberpunk action story, but it fails on all fronts unless you’re into shallow cliched action fiction with a heaping of sci-fi gore. The length is just as frustrating, this POS should not have been anywhere this long.
No. No, I do not recommend this one. Not at all. It was a waste of time. There are better novels out there with the same elements but done better. The only thing that keeps me from being angry that I “read” this was the reader whose talents were wasted reading this bland cookie-cutter cyberpunk novel. Otherwise, as I said before, I would have tossed this sucker away after the first hundred pages.… (altro)

With what is apparently the final book in the tale of Koko P. Martstellar we find our heroine getting an offer she can't refuse from one of the corporate overlords of her world to be his bodyguard, but that doesn't mean that this is a turn for the better. This is between Koko's new boss getting sucked into a test of wills with a political despot (displaying great stupidity on the part of both men) and how Koko's wannabe nemesis Jackie Wire is far from willing to throw in the towel in terms of collecting the bounty on Koko's head. I'm not giving away any spoilers but you can only jump so many sharks until the story takes a turn for the stupid, even if the climax has a certain grim but logical realism about it. I still think that the first book in the trilogy (...series?) "Koko takes a Holiday" is great though.… (altro)