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Headhunters | Rating | |
| B | |||
| 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 | ||
It should have been a simple little job. Just steal a body, already dead, from a funeral home and deliver it to the Johnson. But there are complications, and sudden;y Skater and his team are holding a corpse that everyone wants, from the corps to the cops. If Skater is going to keep his head from decorating somebody's wall, he's going to need to know more. But information can be the most costly thing of all in Seattle of 2057.
Odom starts his story out with a bang, a big one. He wisely skipped the preliminaries - the meet, the deal, casing the place - and gets right to the part that matters. Even if you haven't read Preying For Keeps, it's easy to figure out the various roles of those in Skater's crew, and the details of the deal are easily recounted in a few breaths. And then things get complicated, and the real fun starts.
Odom writes his characters well, perhaps even better than he did in that previous book. Skater, especially, is a very human person, with personal issues intertwined with business, one influencing the other in a very believable manner.
The story itself gets a little confused, though, towards the middle of the book. Not too badly and not for too long, but for a short while I got the impression they were pulling leads out of thin air. It gave those scenes a slightly surreal torne, as I couldn't quite figure out where this clue came from or why they were checking that name out. But then, maybe it was just me.
The author also takes care to mention specific places and times a lot, often down to the second. The scene will be going along smoothly, and suddenly we learn it is 16:02:54, or something, and the restaurant is at the corner of this street and that avenue. Sometimes this is a good thing, helping to keep the two main threads - Skater's team and that of his main competition for the body - tied together in time. Or it might help keep it better attached to Seattle; rather than just say it was downtown, readers can go to a map and find the exact place, if they were so inclined. It gives an extra touch of realism. But a lot of the time these are simply random, useless bits of information that comes out of nowhere, and jolted me out of the story. Just why do we need to know this? I wished Odom wouldn't add this stuff when it wasn't necessary. Either that, or just give a time-and-place stamp at the beginning of each scene.
Don't get me wrong. This is a darn good book - especially if you like gunfights and intrigue. But as much as I liked Skater, and as high as some of these scenes got my pulse rate, there's just something about it that I didn't like. The flaws I mentioned are admittedly subjective, but they were still present. For most readers, though, I suspect they'll find this novel simply a ripping good yarn.
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