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Drops of Corruption | Rating | |
| A | |||
| Jason M. Hardy | |||
| 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 | ||
Bannickburn, elven mage, has fallen on hard times. His power has been burned out of him, and as a result he's wound up as a Seattle drunk who depends on his girlfriend for room and board. Then he catches a break and gets a job from a crime boss, and his luck starts to turn. But getting involved with the mob makes an enemy of his girlfriend, not to mention rival crime families and overly ambitious colleagues. And getting out of the mob is a whole lot tougher than getting in.
This is a slower, more involved story than Shadowrun books tend towards. It doesn't start with a bang, and in fact there is no bang at all anywhere in the first hundred pages. (Though there is one rather loud thump of a scene.) Hardy doesn't concentrate on action like most of the series' other authors; he focuses instead on his characters. Bannickburn especially, of course, but some others as well.
And it works surprisingly well. Bannickburn is a good character, deep and well-conceived. Unlike every other Shadowrun novel out there, he is a washed-up has-been, once great but now a loser extraordinaire. That he was once a top-knotch mage but now must struggle merely to read auras gives him an aura all his own, one of a different sort. It's hard not to cheer for a man reaching for greatness, and it's even easier when he had once achieved it and then lost if through no real fault of his own. Like Rocky entering the ring for one last fight, Bannickburn isn't out so much for glory as just a little sense of dignity.
Hardy's characters rely more on being tricky than brute force. Except for the climax, which was violent enough to suit any Shadowrun fan, there was hardly any gunplay at all. But the story nevertheless did a good job of never letting interest wane. Bannickburn might not have been dodging bullets very often, but that's not to say he wasn't in some very precarious situations.
I've always held the view that stories are written in one of two ways. They can be driven by events, with the author giving the characters whatever skills and history is necessary in order to bring the tale from one incident to the next. Or they can be done by making characters as complete as possible, placing them in a situation, and seeing what they do. Drops of Corruption seems to fall in the latter category. Done well, it transforms characters into people, which makes readers much more emotionally involved. And Hardy did it well.
This is a very different novel from every other book in the series. I can certainly imagine some people, more geared towards the furious action of chases and gunfights that Shadowrun typically offers, might find this a bit too slow and disinteresting. This volume focuses on intrigue and its characters. But it manages to make both of them interesting enough to make what happens actually seem to matter. Bannickburn's troubles seem those of a new but close friend. To me, it was a great change of pace from the usual.
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