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Streets of Blood | Rating | |
| D | |||
| Carl Sargent and Marc Gascoigne | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| Shadowrun | Never Deal with a Dragon, Choose Your Enemies Carefully, Find Your Own Truth, 2XS, Changeling, Never Trust an Elf, Into the Shadows, Streets of Blood, Shadowplay, Night's Pawn, Striper Assassin, Lone Wolf, Fade to Black, Nosferatu, Burning Bright, Who Hunts the Hunter, House of the Sun, Worlds Without End, Just Compensation, Black Madonna, Preying for Keeps, Dead Air, The Lucifer Deck, Steel Rain, Shadowboxer, Headhunters, Stranger Souls, Clockwork Assylum, Beyond the Pale, Blood Sport, Technobabel, Wolf and Raven, Psychotrope, The Terminus Experiment, Run Hard, Die Fast, Crossroads, The Forever Drug, Ragnarock, Tails You Lose, The Burning Time, Born to Run, Poison Agendas, Fallen Angels, Drops of Corruption, Aftershock, A Fistful of Data | ||
In London of 2054, people are dying. Horribly. Gruesomely. Three old friends, seperated for years, are brought together by chance and decide to do something about it. But there may be more behind the deaths than just a random psychopath. And there may be more behind their own actions, as well...
When the story starts out, there are a lot of space breaks. Oddly, this didn't make the book seem choppy, as I might have expected. Instead the scenes were exactly as long as they needed to be to introduce the characters or elicit some mood or emotion, and then moved on.
The plot, however, is nigh incomprehensible. Shadowrun books tend towards the complex, but this was rediculous. Why did the bad guys go after their goal in this manner? Surely there were less chancy paths to take, since it relied so heavily on people ecting exactly as was necessary. And just what was the goal, anyway? Even given the revelations at the very end, it doesn't make much sense.
Further, a new-age recreation of Jack the Ripper seemed just incredibly cliche. Just because cyberpunk is the 21st century's equivalent to gothing when it comes to tone, and the story is set in and around London, it doesn't mean we need to include that. Heck, good ol' Jack had been used once and arguably twice already in this series alone!
And what is this past that Serrin, Geraint, and Francesca share? Something happened a few years ago in America, something that made Geraint look like a nervous incompetent and left Serrin maimed. There's plenty of references to it, espeically in the first half, but never a full disclosure. Not only would it have been nice to know, but with so many hints it felt like an incomplete plot thread when it dropped by the wayside.
Sargent and Gascoigne's writing is good enough, mostly, but the story they wrote just isn't. The plot relied too heavily on people's reactions that could never have been so precisely guessed or controlled, and it just plain didn't hold together. Considering the effort and resources this scheme must have taken, they could have accomplished their goal by much more straightforward and legal - not to mention less lethal - means. And even when everything is spelled out in the last pages, step by step, it didn't scan right. Any book that includes a summary at the end to explain why what we just read isn't what really happened, and it all makes sense if you look at it this way... well, it's not going to rank high on my list.
I suppose Streets of Blod might appeal to readers who like plots complex enough to give Rube Goldberg cold chakes, or endings in which victory is less than total. Goths would probably have a ball with this tale. But as for me, I found it very unsatisfying.
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