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Who Hunts the Hunter | Rating | |
| B | |||
| 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 | ||
Striper is back, and she is pissed. Oh, my, is she pissed. Someone has stolen her kid. Well, her cub, really, since she's a weretiger. And you don't want a weretigress mad at you. No sir.
And that's not all that's going on. There's really two (or arguably three or even four) stories going on here, centered at the research lab that's studying the werecreatures. Amy Bergman is an executive suffering from a corporate audit that has uncovered possible theft of company resources. As head of the purchacing department, it could be her head that rolls for not catching the perpetrator, unless she finds him herself before the auditors do. Bandit is back, as well, trying to get back in touch with his humanity - a quest that will get an unexpected boost from a chance find. Even Minx and Monk return, as well.
Smith seems to have a penchant for writing in present tense. He even has something of a knack for it. It gives the text an otherworldly air to it. These people are only barely connected to the world they live in. They are Other. Mysterious. Magical. Strange and dangerous. It is a rarely used method, and here it's quite refreshing.
On the other hand, it does make the characters hard to relate to. This is especially true for readers who haven't encountered some of these characters in Smith's previous fooks, but even for those who already know them it will be hard to really connect to them. This aura of mystery and wierdness makes it impossible to get close. I felt no sorrow or sympathy when Striper's child was taken, no satisfaction as Bandit played his magical tricks on the corporate stuffed shirts, no pride as Amy defends her corporation from soulless auditors or reighteousness as she tracks down corruption. The entire book is an emtionless blank.
There's also the matter of all those story threads. There are three main perspectives and three minor ones, and several times Smith pulls another out of nowhere for a brief look through yet more sets of eyes. It's never actually confusing - the characters and situations are too diverse for that - but they don't mesh together well. Not only does the book advance in short fits, following one character for only a handfull of pages - often less than two - before switching over to the next point of view, but several of the minor plotlines barely even intersect with the main one. Monk and Minx's contributions to the book are as periphery and irrelevant as last time. And there's a new duo, a kind of super secret sewer security service, that also has little to do with anything. Except Monk and Minx. Barely. All the connections between the minor plots and the major ones are tenuous at best.
Lastly, Striper's plotline is puzzling. It just has a few too many logical holes in it. Given the motive, that this is so might make sense - people with personal issues don't always think very well. So the method of the capture, the failure to secure Striper herself when they had the chance, and a few other flaws in logic might make sense, I admit. It still seems like a bad idea, though, begging failure. And when moving against Striper, any failure will we catastrophic and very fatal.
I am not sure why the author didn't make this more than one book. None of the storylines are bad, they just barely impinge on each other. Smith could easily have made this into two books, possibly three, by just expanding each plot until it had enough meat to stand on its own. Perhaps it is best thought of as a braided novel. Two of the plotlines even have similar themes of understanding humanity and thus becoming more human. But it doesn't entirely work, even then.
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