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The Lucifer Deck | Rating | |
| B | |||
| Lisa Smedman | |||
| 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 | ||
Pita is an orc, one of the more persecuted races in the Seattle of the Awakened World. All she wants to do is get word out about how Lone Star officers gunned down three of her friends in cold blood - or, failing thatget her brain a little wasted on Mindease. But when she witnesses another death, a very strange one, the reporters who'd earlier turned her away scramble to hear what she has to say. And some other folks are interested in her as well, for what she looted off the body.
This isn't the typical Shadowrun book. It has pretty much everything, true - megacorps, metahumans, magic, munitions, the mob, and the Matrix - but they're actually in fairly small doses. Even Pita's awakening abilities as a shaman, while important to her character development and critical to her role in the climax, are minimized. She's just too new to her gift to throw spells around casually, whether it's to achieve an objective or overcome some obstacle or threat. Pita comes across as a young girl with some magic, not as an actual shaman. Which is a good thing, since that really is what she is.
The main focus of the book is in the mystery of the man's death. Pita needs to get the goons off her tail, and the reporters want a good story. Doing either will involve figuring out exactly what Pita saw, what it meant, and of course who is responsible. While Pita's personal quest to expose the those Lone Star officers is foremost in her mind, it is in truth a side plot. Everything else are mere spices.
The Lucifer Deck does a pretty good job, exploring aspects of the Shadowrun setting readers haven't yet encountered. Specifically, the news industry. We get a good behinf-the-scenes look at how editing and reporting is done there, as well as a peek at some of the related technology and office politics. Readers also see things from an orc's point of view, something not done since Never Trust and Elf, way back in book six. We also get a new look at how shamans realize their powers. It's much shorter than what Sam Vernor had to go through in the Secrets of Power trilogy that opened the Shadowrun universe, which makes it more comprehensible and easier to follow at the expense of realism. (Well, I at least thought the ordeals Sam went through, and his reactions to them, were more likely, anyway.) The only real complaint is that the report's colleague is remeniscent of the cowardly Vernon Fenwick, the competing reporter from the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles television series. I hated that guy, and I'm not too fond of this version, either.
This is a good installment in the Shadowrun saga. With good, human characters that react as people should and a healthy dose of mayhem, fans of the setting will probably like what they see here.
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