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Preying for Keeps | Rating | |
| A | |||
| Mel Odom | |||
| 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 | ||
Skater had put together a good team. They work well together, and more importantly they respect each other. Betrayal might be a constant worry with other runners, but not Skater's crew. Which makes it all the more devestating when it happens.
Now Skater and the surviving runners want some payback. But first they'll have to unvover what and why. What they find may lead to the revenge they're after, if it doesn't kill them first. Which is a real possibility. After all, the mob, the yakuza, megacorporations and Tir Tairngire can be considered the small guns in this matter.
This book was wonderful from start to finish. Well, almost to the finish, but I'll get to that in a bit. Odom didn't just write names and roles, as so often happens in Shadowrun. Skater is a person with depth. He has a past, he has regrets and fears. And most notably, he changes. It's the sign of good writing when a story noticably changes the outlook and attitude of its cast, rather than just giving them some memories.
It's also chock full of action, usually in the form of gunplay, though magic and the Matrix certainly play their parts in the plot.
Odom worked his plot wisely. It is no world-shattering threat, which was to me a pleasant change. Odom seemed to realize that one doesn't need to threaten global catastrophe to be an evil villain. It was also nice to see a plot that revolved around personal motives - as in, there's no pay involved in what they're doing - and be able to believe it. The other, previous books that tried that typically had the characters spend oodles of money, often well beyond their supposed means, to follow vague feelings that something might be after them. Skater's gang knows someone set them up, and with their resources as a professional team of runners close at hand not much in the way of finances or favors is required.
If the book has one problem, it's that it ends too early. This isn't mere;y a matter of wanting more of Odom's prose. It's just that once the fight that makes up the climax is respolved, the story stops cold. It doesn't conclude, it just comes to a screeching halt. There is no hint of how anyone's lives will continue or change, either personally or professionally, other than what was discussed much earlier when things were still up in the air. It's a real shame, since, for Skater at least, both may be altered quite drastically.
Preying for Keeps is a wonderful addition to the Shadowrun line. It's a bit light on the expotic elements of magic and Matrix, but it more than makes up for it with plenty of more mundane action, and it's still very distinctly not the real world the readers live in. It could really use an epilogue, though.
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