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Stranger Souls | Rating | |
| C | |||
| Jak Koke | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| Shadowrun: The Dragon Heart Saga | 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 | ||
Dunkelzahn, President of the United Canadian and American States, is dead. Assassinated. Destroyed utterly on his inauguration day. Now it will be up to Ryan Mercury, Dunkelzahn's best and most trusted undercover operative, to undertake the greatest and most important mission in his life. Not discovering who killed the Great Dragon, no. He must take the powerful magical item known as the Dragon Heart to Thayla, on the metaplanes, to avert worldwide catastrophe. But that won't exactly be as straightforward as it sounds. A mystic organization has stolen it from its vault, a magic-addicted cyborg that has a grudge against Ryan wants it for himself, and the ruthless leader of one of the more reprehensible megacorps out there does plan to just sit on the sidelines. Yet the enemy Ryan will have the hardest time fighting may well be himself.
Dunkelzahn's death has been mentioned in the last five or six books - and it actually impacted the plot in the last book, Headhunters - which makes this the only set of books that are out of strict chronological order within the Shadowrun milieu. It also is one of the few things that happen that cannot be entirely ignored (although I would think Chicago getting nuked in an earlier book would also fall into this category, but somehow that one didn't). Now at last we get the full story behind the assassination and its investigation. Even though the book isn't really about that, given Ryan's close ties to the Great Dragon it is inevitable that we get a close look at things. It's nice to get more than hints of what might have happened, which was all the other books offered.
But unfortunately, the telling is seriously flawed to my eyes. The plot relies a bit much on coincidence to throw obstacles in Ryan's way. Roxborough, the corporate magnate, just has to use Ryan for his plans - nobody else will do. Quite an odd attitude for someone willing to kidnap, torture, and kill people, someone so ruthless that nobody is allowed to retire except in the most permanent manner. The theft of the Dragon's Heart is peculiarly easy and timed just so. The super cyborg, Burnout, just happens to be just the right sort of personality to decide to interfere well beyond the manner he has been ordered to. And perhaps one or two others, but those are the big ones. One is fine - you don't have much of a story if everything goes smoothly and according to plan, and coincidence can certainly be a part of that - and two I can accept. Three is pushing it, though. It just seemed contrived, that if luck had broke Ryan's way just once, this would not have turned into the ordeal it became.
I was also disappointed to find good guys very thin on the ground. Ryan was fine for the short time he was himself - a few pages at the very start of the book - but then magic messes with his head and he's never quite the same again. Roxborough is already beyond hope, of course, and Burnout is literally a killing machine. The spirit Lethe's motives are pure and good, but his alien nature makes hom hard to sympathise with. That leaves only Ryan's lover and Dunkenlahn's personal aide, Nadja Daviar, who is rarely a factor in the book. It turns the story into an ugly, nasty excercise to read through.
Of course, there are reasons to read this, nevertheless. Greatest among them being that both these flaws are very subjective in nature. Other readers may not share these issues. The plot is also fairly fast-paced, only letting up briefly in a few areas to let everybody catch their breath. And, of course, there is the fact I mentioned earlier, that we are getting a good, close look at one of Shadowrun's more pivotal events. Those positives didn't really make the book any more pleasant for me, I'm afraid, but they did give me more than enough reasons not to give up on it.
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