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Blood Sport | 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 | ||
Leni is a private dick, an ex-cop. When her adopted grandmother, living upstairs, is killed, that's bad enough to make her want to bring the perpetrators to justice. But when it is done by religious missionaries, that raises her eyebrows. And when the missionaries in turn are found dead at the airport, skinned alive, she thinks something more than just the usual random murder is going on. And she's right.
In general this is a fine story that fits well with the Shadowrun universe. There's the mystery that evolves from something simple to reveal a world-shattering plot. There's plenty of gunfire. Magic is prominently involved. The Matrix is prety much ignored in this book - I can't immediately think of a Shadowrun book that involves it less, in fact, but it is still definitely Shadowrun. Leni is not a very deep personality. We learn of one incident from her days at Lone Star, and a little bit about why she cares so much for Mama Grande, but by and large she's a blank slate. It's enough to tell the story here, though.
I had some problems with that story, though. For one thing, Smedman is constantly sprinkling the text with little temporal clues. The book was in first person, told from Leni's point of view, the action being described by her. "I did this," and "I said that." And at least once per chapter she would add something to the effect of, "Only later would I find out how wrong I was." This is fine once or twice, but doing it so often is irritating as hell. It immediately drops readers out of the flow of the story in order to drop a hint of future events that she and we shouldn't know at that point. If it was an attempt at foreshadowing, it was a blatant failure.
I was also a bit disappointed by the way the case progressed. Most of the clues were practically given to them. They go to person A, who tells them some things and says you should check out person B, who tells them more and points them at person C. And so on. Leni and her companion do very little figuring of their own, making me think of the story as a trail of breadcrumbs to follow more than a mystery to be solved.
Lastly, it was just a bad choice to have things once again end up down in Aztlan. But it's not the author's fault. It works for the story, it makes sense, and it gives readers an interesting look at an acient Aztec sport. But with the Dragon Heart Saga jut concluded, it would have been wiser of the publisher to put one or two stories in between that trilogy and this book. It kind of felt like all the bad cartoons of the 1980s, where the good guys fight the same villain over and over.
This isn't a bad story, in most ways, but it certainly could have been better. There is nothing grand or spectacular here to raise the book above its flaws. On the other hand, those problems aren't really all that major. It's an adequate book, one more story told in this unique milieu, but that's really about it.
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