Carlos J. Cortes

Its really hard to review this book without giving too much away, but I'll do my best.
It's 2049 & Earth's prisons are shut down, all inmates placed in hibernation tanks. When prisoners check into Washington D.C.'s maximum security 'sugar cube', they don't check out. Within this new system lie not only the planet's most dangerous criminals, but also half a million people whose only offense is to challenge those in power.

After pulling off a harrowing escape, Laurel Cole and her team must elude the police by descending into the sewer beneath the city. Pursued by a ruthless mercenary,(& one of my favorite characters) Laurel seeks help from a group of renegades who live underground among the balls of fat and matted hair, the nasty floating tampons and mystery items mixed into the refuse from the city above. Will she ever see daylight and expose the government's lies?

I was hooked from the very first line and hopelessly tangled into this fast paced adventure by Chapter 2. I loved Carlos's first book, Perfect Circle, but Prisoner will be forever a favorite over everything I've read.

As I read I could smell the sewers, feel the slimy, chunky bits of nasty on my skin, even taste the air, not a good thing if you eat while reading. I can't even imagine walking through this place for real, as he did to research this book.
A nail-biter from start to finish, full of unforgettable characters, even the villain is fascinating, twists and turns that leave you breathless, this was a read I thoroughly enjoyed and a book I will definitely read again.
I would recommend this to anyone, regardless of 'favorite genre' simply as a damn good read.

I can't wait for the next one.… (altro)

The Writer's Companion is one of the best reference books I've read on style and writing. Every aspect is covered from grammar, to syntax, to editing, and this is just to start. Literally, it is filled with all the rules and regulations of the written word.

If you want, for example, to learn how to correctly and effectively pull off a first person POV, where every other sentence has the potential of beginning with the "hateful little vowel 'I'", then Writer's Companion will provide you with an alternative, as in the following: "I heard a noise outside my window" could be rewritten, "A scratching sound drew my glance to the window."

Or if you want to learn about New Sudden Fiction, then you can start with a six-word short story that was allegedly written by Earnest Hemingway: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." In this piece, the Companion is quick to show us, "though some elements are only implied, it has character, setting, conflict, plot, theme, beginning, middle and end." The Writer's Companion is filled with examples and gems such as these.

I found the formatting easy to follow and very well-organized; actually, much better to use than the Chicago Manual of Style. The advice is clear and concise and sometimes even anecdotal. The Writer's Companion is essential for writers and anyone who wants to write. It should be a standard.… (altro)

I owe a debt of gratitude to those intrepid folks who select the nominees for the Philip K. Dick Award – the award given each year for the best science fiction novel first published in paperback. If they had not nominated The Prisoner, I would likely never have read it. It hasn’t been widely reviewed, at least not by my usual sources, and the premise isn’t the sort that would catch my eye if I were browsing on Amazon or in a bookstore. It sounds pretty much like a thriller with a science fictional edge, not my usual fare.

And it is a thriller with a science fictional edge. Sometimes one really should read outside one’s normal range of material, and for me, this was one of those times. I enjoyed The Prisoner thoroughly. I would never accuse it of being high art, but gosh, it was fun to read. It made me hungry for popcorn, because reading it felt like watching a movie – and it is written in a very cinematic manner, and likely would make a good movie. The scenes in the sewers would be quite exciting enough for any audience.

The premise of The Prisoner is that the United States has adopted a new method of warehousing criminals who have been tried and convicted. Rather than keeping prisoners conscious but confined, they are put into hibernation and slipped into maximum security “sugar cubes” – tanks filled with a solution that keeps them alive and healthy (more or less), but needing no food, little space, and no diversions to keep them peaceful. Basically, they need little of anything except a bit of maintenance.

But as with seemingly every governmental system, this radical new way of dealing with prisoners has been abused. Each sugar cube has a center section that is supposed to be reserved for experimentation with the hibernation technique. Instead, “center inmates” are troublemakers the government wants kept out of the way – or worse. There is no public accounting kept of them, and they are kept very, very secret.

The Prisoner is the story of a determined group of people who want to bring these secrets to light. To do so, a small but intrepid trio of volunteers agrees to be incarcerated in order to gain access to the facilities. The recounting of their intubation is excruciating to read, especially when one realizes it has to happen numerous times each day. More than that, though, their escape from the facility through the sewers is an adventure worthy of a movie director like, say, Ridley Scott (who has a real touch with science fiction). It’s plain that Cortes did a fair amount of research about what happens down there below us, and his background as an engineer shows. These scenes are harrowing.

Politics takes over once the sewers have been gotten through, and this part of the tale is equally harrowing, though in a different way. The old saying is that making both sausage and legislation are equally disgusting, but it seems to me that those toiling in the vineyards of the administrative process are probably much worse. (Think of what we’ve been learning over the past few years about the Minerals Management Service, for instance.) Cortes gives us evil politicians and honorable ones, those taking risks for the good of the country and those taking risks for their own personal gain.

There aren’t any gray areas in this book, really; the bad guys wear black hats, and are easily identifiable. If you want subtlety, look elsewhere. If you just want a rip-roaring good read for a summer afternoon in the hammock, this is the book for you.… (altro)