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Striper Assassin | Rating | |
| C | |||
| Nyx Smith | |||
| 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 | ||
First, a note: the title of this book is not, repeat not, "Stripper Assassin." Note the single p. This is a somewhat important difference.
Striper is, as you may guess, an assassin. We met her briefly in Find Your Own Truth, but it is here that she gets her chance to shine. She is very good at her job, with a very special hole card. Her skills let her be very choosy in who she works for, and who she kills. But there just may be something strange about her latest string of victims. Much like Striper herself, things may not be quite as they appear...
Written in present tense, the story has an immediacy most others lack. The peculiar choice also lends an unearthly flavor to the text, which is a good thing given the inhuman mindset of the main character. Smith might have been wise to mitigate this somewhat, however, on those ocassions the story shifts its point of view away from Striper.
Striper sees the world in terms of hunter and prey. All the world, all the time. It makes her very professional, very cold, very deadly. But the attitude grew tiresome quickly. A good part of that is due to simple anthrocentrism; seeing humans thought of as prey, or cattle, or witless sheep isn't pleasant when the thought is repeated over and over. Even less so when it is so often proved true, at least compared to this predator in human form.
The book's main problem is that there isn't anybody in it that is particularly likable. Stiper is cold, emotionless, ruthless. Everyone else is either a bastard or an outright villain. The one exception, a newbie decker who calls herself Angel, is so green it's hard to believe she's still breathing, much less that she has the decent-to-good skills she purportedly does. And she has only a minor role, anyway. There's nobody in between, nobody to cheer for that I'd actually want to win.
Shadowrun is a dog-eat-dog sort of world. There are few good guys and even fewer innocents. Here, there are essentially none at all of either. It reminds me a great deal of the movie Pulp Fiction. Striper is an antihero in the same vein.
Placed within that frame, using that as perspective, this is actually not a bad book. But it just isn't really to my taste. Still, if you liked Pulp Fiction, then this is probably to yours.
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