2006 SF/fantasy. Alan Reece is a vet who hates his job, who's just
seen something downright strange on a late night call. Kate is an
ex-medium turned physics student whose models of the new particle
accelerator show some disturbing possibilities. It's not the end of
the world. If we're lucky.
Disclaimer: Nick is a friend; we game together and co-host a film
podcast. I did not pay for this book. He knows I'm going to give it an
honest review.
This is high-stakes SF/fantasy, a story of a small number of people
granted the chance to save the world… written with a strong
sensibility of Douglas Adams (or, given Alan's monstrously low
self-image, Tom Holt). It's not so much comedy as the need to laugh
because the alternative is worse. (But I have an odd relationship with
comedy.)
Several of Alan's incidents may be familiar if you've read Once
Bitten (which of course came out rather later), but soon enough he's
getting out of that life and into the world-saving business – which
might be a bit of a wrench if you were expecting a book about vetting,
but this isn't that book. It seems that souls have some sort of
detectable reality, but the afterlife isn't as complicated as anyone
had portrayed it. Or as pleasant. And nobody's keeping a terribly good
lock on the gates.
All right, there's a revelation at about the two-thirds mark which
Alan doesn't understand until four-fifths, but that's not as much
delay as seen in some protagonists, even ones who are supposedly
dedicated investigators. One of the two strands of narrative cuts off
sharply and, in doing so, gives another clue. But, well, this isn't
supposed to be a mystery.
Characterisation is convincing, but somehow shallow; people get more
than one personality trait, which is more than many writers manage,
but they still feel more like a collection of traits than like
coherent people; one of them is just there to be an object of mockery,
and another is a bit too perfect.
On the other hand this book doesn't suffer from what I think of as the
usual first-novel problems: in particular, it isn't crammed so full of
ideas that it can't do justice to them (nor does it lack them). It's
not perhaps a masterpiece, and the voice is more Adams/Holt than
Marsh, but it gets the basics right in a way I found most welcome.
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