Automatic Reload by Ferrett Steinmetz
I loved the Mancer series by Ferrett Steinmetz and so when I saw the description for Automatic Reload it was something of a no-brainer that I wanted this book in my life. Here’s a short snippet of the original description to give you something of an idea:
‘Ferrett Steinmetz‘s quirky, genre-mashing cyberpunk romance Automatic Reload a high-octane adventure about a grizzled mercenary with machine gun arms who unexpectedly falls in love with a bio-engineered assassin.’
This was a very entertaining story, quick paced and high octane indeed. Steinmetz certainly does deliver a genre-mashing quirky romance and even with all the descriptions of guns and customised body parts he still manages to infuse this action story with plenty of warmth.
The story involves two key characters. Mat, a former soldier, now a mercenary who has been offered a job with a dream payout. If things go smoothly he’ll be very comfortable for quite some time (what could possibly go wrong?). Mat is the top in his field. This is a future where people can replace limbs with high grade weaponry andMat has gone for all four limbs. His attention to detail has ensured him an enviable reputation but, he suffers with guilt that means he likes to examine all the risks before taking action. Silvia is a genetically engineered assassin, almost inhuman in terms of strength, speed and agility with a panic disorder that makes her a little trigger happy. Silvia has been engineered almost beyond recognition by a ruthless company that will pull out all the stops to retrieve her when she goes AWOL and this is when Mat and Silvia team up.
What I will say about AR is it’s a whole load of fun. Steinmetz is really good with banter and also including all sorts of references that simply give you a buzz when you’re reading his stories. Automatic Reload isn’t necessarily a complicated plot, it’s really a boy meets girl story where the two people in question have their own hang ups and never believed that anyone would give them a second look again and so were overjoyed to find this unexpected second chance. It’s also a rescue mission, boy rescues girl, girl rescues boy, etc and more than that it’s a rage against the machine style plot that goes from fast to faster and promotes all round good feelings.
Of course all this out and out action does come at a slight cost. The characters are thinly drawn and the romance and love is almost instantaneous. That’s not really a criticism as it happens because for me lengthy descriptions and too much backstory would probably overload what is otherwise a very entertaining read that has a superhero or comic book feel to it and is a breath of fresh air.
I think the only issue that I really experienced is that there was a little too much information about the body hackers and all their tech. It wasn’t a problem as such but it did reach a point where I felt I understood the workings and wanted to move on.
I had no problems racing from cover to cover. This has plenty of action. Characters that are on the side of good, trying to do good things and a helluva lot of explosions – not to mention some incredibly creative thinking, particularly with the car scene – which I won’t spoil – but was great.
What I can say with absolute certainty is that Steinmetz is an author whose work I really enjoy.
I would rate this 3.5 of 5 stars
I received a copy through Netgalley, courtesy of the publisher, for which my thanks. the above is my own opinion.
Can’t Wait Wednesday : The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse
12 August 2020
Filed under Book Reviews
Tags: Can't wait Wednesday, Sarah Pearse, The Sanatorium, Wishful Endings
“Waiting On Wednesday” is a weekly meme that was originally created by Breaking the Spine. Unfortunately Breaking the Spine are no longer hosting so I’m now linking my posts up to Wishful Endings Can’t Wait Wednesday. Don’t forget to stop over, link up and check out what books everyone else is waiting for. If you want to take part, basically, every Wednesday, we highlight a book that we’re really looking forward to. This week my book is : The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse. The idea of a sanatorium, in fact, excuse me, an abandoned sanatorium, being turned into a hotel – chills much? Here’s the description:
‘At first glance they’re magnificent, yet the more she looks, the more she realizes how sinister the mountains appear: raw, jagged spikes. It’s not hard to imagine, she thinks, looking out; this place somehow consuming someone, swallowing them whole.’
An imposing, isolated hotel, high up in the Swiss Alps, is the last place Elin Warner wants to be. But she’s taken time off from her job as a detective, so when she receives an invitation out of the blue to celebrate her estranged brother’s recent engagement, she has no choice but to accept.
Arriving in the midst of a threatening storm, Elin immediately feels on edge. Though it’s beautiful, something about the hotel, recently converted from an abandoned sanatorium, makes her nervous – as does her brother, Isaac.
And when they wake the following morning to discover his fiancée Laure has vanished without a trace, Elin’s unease grows. With the storm cutting off access to and from the hotel, the longer Laure stays missing, the more the remaining guests start to panic.
But no-one has realized yet that another woman has gone missing. And she’s the only one who could have warned them just how much danger they’re all in . . .
Expected Publication : February 2021
The Shadow Friend by Alex North
My TL:DR Five Word Review: Thriller with plenty of twists
The Shadow Friend was another very good read from Alex North. I really enjoyed the Whisper Man and so when I saw The Shadow Friend I knew I had to read it and I’m so glad I did. It feels like Alex North has plenty of fresh ideas and can spin a creepy tale that seems to border on the supernatural without ever actually crossing the line.
Shadow Friends is a book about murder. Two school boys killed one of their classmates. One of them seemed to disappear and one was brought to justice. Another friend, not involved in the murder escaped the village and never came back until his mother was taken to hospital following a fall.
Paul Adams escaped his hometown following the death of a friend. Twenty five years later his mother has suffered a fall and Paul travels home bringing back to the surface unwanted and painful memories. It appears that not everyone is happy to see Paul return and his steps seem to be shadowed. Couple this with a new investigation following a copycat murder in a nearby village and you have the makings of a tense, chilling and mysterious story.
I really enjoyed this. The tension practically oozes off the page and the mystery of it all held me fairly spellbound. I simply had to know what was going on and the curiosity drove me forward at a fairly relentless pace.
To be honest, I thought the first half of the book was gripping. We flip back and forth learning a little of Paul and his earlier years. Charlie Crabtree is one of Paul’s friends, although I use the term loosely because Charlie is one of those characters that you just know is ‘one for the future’. Charlie dominates the small group of friends and Paul is the only one to challenge his strange ideas of lucid dreaming eventually forcing Paul from the group entirely. Which is probably something of a break given the turn things take.
Then the second half seemed to ramp the suspense up even more.
At the same time that Paul is mentally torturing himself about the past and feeling guilt over what he could have done differently, his movements are being shadowed, his presence in town isn’t welcome and somebody wants him to leave. However, the investigation I referred to above is taking on a life of its own, the investigating officer has connected the dots and although this is clearly a copycat killer it seems that an online chat group could possible lead to the original perpetrator’s whereabouts being uncovered. Charlie has taken on a dark cult status with a following that talks of the crime he commited. Unfortunately, the new investigations seem to prompt a new round of killings – but, I’ll stop there because spoilers are highly likely and nobody wants a runaway blabbermouth now do they?
The characters. Paul is likable and carries the story with ease – certainly to the extent that I found myself wanting to shout directions and instructions at him from the safety of my own living room like the cheap seats of a theatre (he’s behind you). Charlie is a very easy to dislike character. He’s manipulative and scheming and has a very dark streak. The author does provide some history and a better understanding of Charlie’s motivations as the story progresses and this was a welcome inclusion that really helps to firm the foundations for events.
I enjoyed the setting. We jump back to the school years with the bullying and awkward teenage boy moments. There’s the forest that seems to back onto the boy’s houses and that takes on a life of its own with overgrown trails, snapping twigs and an overall ghostly atmosphere and there’s the overall creep factor which was here by the bucketload.
In terms of criticisms. I don’t really have much to say here. I had a couple of little issues here and there but nothing that really merits mention.
On the whole I found this a thoroughly enjoyable read. It’s dark and twisted – in fact, the main twist – omg – did not see that coming at all. Then of course there’s a good number of other little twists but that main one – wow, what a sucker punch that was.
Chilling, riveting, creepy. Another winning instalment by an author that I will definitely be keeping an eye on.
My rating 4 of 5 stars
I received a copy through Netgalley, courtesy of the publisher, for which my thanks. The above is my own opinion.
Top Ten Tuesday : Books I Loved but Never Reviewed
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme where every Tuesday we look at a particular topic for discussion and use various (or more to the point ten) bookish examples to demonstrate that particular topic. Top Ten Tuesday (created and hosted by The Broke and Bookish) is now being hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl and future week’s topics can be found here. This week’s topic :
Books I Loved but Never Reviewed
I really like this topic because it gives me the opportunity to shout out about some excellent books that I unfortunately, probably due to timescales for review books, didn’t get to review at the time I read them. All of these book are ones that I bought and although I read and loved them the reviews got put off and then I sort of lost momentum. I confess I feel quite guilty! Anyway, here are some lovelies for you:
- The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison
- Starsight by Brandon Sanderson
- King of the Road by RS Belcher
- Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers
- The Tethered Mage by Melissa Caruso
- American Gods by Neil Gaiman
- How to Flirt with a Naked Werewolf by Molly Harper
- Envy of Angels by Matt Wallace
- Phantom Pains by Mishell Baker
- The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett
Driftwood by Marie Brennan
My TL:DR Five Word Review: My oh my. How unusual.
What a strange and strangely unique story this was. On the face of it, it’s a world with different countries colliding together and then shrinking before disappearing from existence completely. A story brought together by different inhabitants from all those countries recounting their own stories, all centering around one particular character, a character called Last who is known simply because he’s been around longer than anyone else. It’s an odd concept, this group of people sitting around recounting their own tales, it feels like a meeting of strangers at a funeral all sharing stories of the deceased, which is also kind of fitting when you consider that each of the worlds here are about to pop out of existence. And, at the same time as being a totally fictional place cram packed with imaginative and quirky details this can also be taken as an allegory, maybe of the history of the world or perhaps a look at disappearing civilisations. It’s not as though we haven’t discovered our share of civilisations that have become extinct and it’s a fascinating part of the world’s history and this particular book takes a look at the way stories are shared and passed down from one generation on to the next until finally they’re so fundamentally changed or parts of them completely forgotten that that particular time and place is eventually lost to us.
So, this story really highlights the way we tell our stories. Short story collections don’t usually work for me but this one did and that’s because it’s not a typical anthology, it’s a complete story told by a number of different people and in that respect it works very well. This is a world that contains multiple worlds, it’s like a collection of all the disappeared civilisations, an imagining that brings them together, jostling for position, almost like flotsam bobbing randomly upon the waves before being sucked into a vortex.
The writing is good, it’s crisp and there is no wastage. To be honest it surprised me that it pulled me into the story because it isn’t really character focused (although Last is the main thread throughout) and I do like my stories to be character led. It’s difficult to get to grips with the characters when they’re discovered in this way and yet I find myself in the strange position of liking Last and in fact I think he could totally be the star of his own show if the author decided to tell his story.
In terms of world building. Well, I had no problem picking this one up and running with it. It’s like if you imagine all the fairy tales ever told belonging to one world, like the Neverending Story, if you like, they’ve all come together for their last gasp before blinking out of existence. And like the Neverending Story there is no shortage of worlds and people – they’re not deeply dwelled upon but they are quite fascinating and sketched in a way that is entertaining and curious all at once.
In terms of criticisms. Well, I can imagine that this might not appeal to everyone in fact I’m the first to confess that when I started this I had that horrible sinking feeling that it simply wasn’t going to be my cup of tea. It certainly doesn’t follow a traditional format and in some respects it feels like a precursor to something else – I certainly hope so. It’s not a swords and sorcery style story, in fact it’s really not a traditionally told story at all – but I find that it worked for me on this particular occasion and even more so because of the style, creativity and ability to make me ponder. I like a good ponder.
Overall, I’d give this 4 out of 5 stars
I received a copy through Netgalley, courtesy of the publisher, for which my thanks. The above is my own opinion.
Books and travelling with Lynn 