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Fade to Black | 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 | ||
Rico heads a top-notch team of shadowrunners in the Neward 'plex. But his sense of honor won't let him take just any job. Murders, kidnappings, and other such nastiness is far below him and his crew. So when he's offered a run to recover some corporate suit who'd been kidnapped, that's perfectly fine. Except the run wasn't what it seemed, and now he has to figure out how to keep a megacorp and his own fixer from taking his head when he decides to make it right.
The main storyline is quite enjoyable. Rico's team is very professional, very competent, but by no means are they a monolithic entity. Everyone has their own personality, with all the accompanying strengths and weaknesses. Piper is what a Gaian Pagan might be in a corporate distopia, and as such is all calm and serene except in regards to the corps that rule the planet. Bandit is quiet, clever, and perhaps a little too self-absorbed. And so on. The missions are well thought out, and nobody acts stupid, like deciding to sell out for a bigger cash bonus, just because the author wants to throw a monkey wrench into the works. And although I don't agree with Rico's interpretation of how his honor lies, I can certainly see how it can be thought of has he says. In other words, while the problems he brought down on himself and his team could easily have been avoided, it is not arbitrary.
Well, not for a while, anyway. There is the betrayal of trust that seems to happen for no good reason except to provide a reason for Rico to want to back out of the deal he wrought. Had the fixer been more truthful, Rico might never have taken the job, true - but it's not the type of job that nobody would ever take if they knew the truth. I just con't understand why the lie was necessary. The character at one point says, "Half-truths and lies are an integral part of the biz," and that's certainly true in this universe, but not when they serve no purpose.
There's also the problem of one of the side plots. Two of them make sense, although we don't learn exactly how until at least halfway through the story. But a third is absolutely irrelevant to anything. Monk and Mink's storyline makes little sense, and doesn't influence the main plot at all. It doesn't even intersect it until the final pages. So why is it even in here?
Lastly, the truth was apparently very mutable. What we know about the situation, and about the roles of the people Rico's crew nabbed, changes. They change a lot. He was kidnapped and they're taking him back. No, it was... no, he really... but she... After a while it ceases to be a twisty plot and just becomes an ediface built on ever-shifting sand. There was nothing to put faith in, no truth I could really trust except for Rico's honor- which, in turn, took him to places I disagree with.
This could have been a fine story. But there were a few too many twists for me to take, a few too many additions that struck me as unnecessary. They steadily turned this from a good story of betrayal and an op gone wrong into something not at all to my taste.
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