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Nosferatu | Rating | |
| C | |||
| 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 | ||
When Serrin Shamander, elven mage, saves the mayor of New York City from an assassination attempt, he finds himself in the papers - and on the run. Someone is trying to kill him. Or perhaps kidnap him, which in the shadows of the awakened world of the 2050s could be an even worse thing. But if it's not the assassins out for revenge, then what is it? Who and why are they after him? What began as an attempt to track down his assailants for revenge may end up saving the planet.
All that stuff at the start about the mayor is all irrelevant. It's entirely superfluous. So why did the authors include it? Calling it a red herring works, sort of, but it's simply dwelt on for too long. Something that gets fifty pages or so deserves to have some significance. It would have been nice if it had somehow been tied back into the story, somehow. As it is, all it does is give Serrin a contact with the media - a contact that, realistically, he would want used over his dead body. That contact did not exactly endear herself to him, and he should use her as little as possible. Instead, she eventually provides a few critical clues at his request. The whole affair was handled poorly.
Another major irritant is that the main character is not the principal mover and shaker. Once Serrin hooks up with the decker Michael, the other characters become almost useless. Tom the troll is just there most of the time, Kristen the waif gives some crucial information and then sticks around for no particular reason except that she wants to and Serrin doesn't feel up to telling her to go, and even Serrin himself does little. They all just stand there while Michael does his thing. The decker knows most everything they need to know, and can ferret out any information he's missing. In a mystery, which is what the heart of this novel is, you want a detective to be the main character. So why isn't he? At the very least, why do the authors let the rest be so useless for so long?
Nosferatu is a pretty good idea for a Shadowrun book, but in my opinion it was handled poorly. Michael was really the main character for most of the book, despite how it's all about Serrin, and the resulting story didn't work well at all. Combined with pages of pointless goings-on and some irritating mumbo-jumbo about past lives - the existance or possibility of which had never been mentioned or even hinted at in any previous novel - I found it a seriously flawed tale.
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