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Crossroads | Rating | |
| C | |||
| Stephen Kenson | |||
| 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 | ||
Talon has been working as the resident mage for Ryan Mercury and Assets, Inc. ever since the whole Dragon Heart affair. But it seems someone wants him dead and wants it bad. So Talon is off to his original hometown, Boston, to find out who and, just as importantly, why. What he discovers will draw the curtain back on his past, and may force him to rewrite his own personal history.
Overall, this is a pretty good story. The setup isn't really all that original, but the things Talon discovers about himself certainly are. Talon is a reasonably complete character, as might be expected, given how the book depends so heavily on his past. And the plot itself has all the requisite twists, not to mention action, that a Shadowrun book demands.
But if Talon is a complete character, the others are not. Angel and Boom are virtually flat. Further, while the plot as a whole isn't bad, it includes several very cliché moments. Coming home to find a woman in his home pointing a gun at him, for instance, or confronting a target early because he couldn't wait for backup.
I was also rather put out by some of Talon's decisions. They just seem a bit... questionable. When you've done nothing wrong and your apartment is attacked, why not wait for police, if you've already taken care of the assailants? His quip that he doesn't want to test the quality of his fake ID is outright stupid, considering that's what these things are for. Besides, Jane-in-the-Box is supposed to be among the best available, so why the sudden worry that her false documents might not hold water? It just makes no sense. Neither does his insistence on forgoing any help from friends and teammates in Assets, Inc., which could have made things so very much easier. I can understand being a lone wolf - though I don't think he ever really fit that mold, his assertions to the contrary - but he's too smart to scorn the resources available to him. Yet he not only refuses to ask for help, but turns it down when it is offered. The only possible reasons behind it are the author's, and not Talon's.
Yet I could have still considered this a good book if it weren't for a different problem entirely, one that cropped up during a scene where Talon was captured. He's drugged, helpless, at his enemy's mercy. Readers are wondering how he's going to break out of this one, or if the author will be reduced to using a deus ex machina when we suddenly learn that he was faking. He was never drugged, he was never helpless. This is all very well and good, except the book is told from first person! There was no hint of faking. No thoughts of when he should break free, or worries that the bad guy will see through the act. It ruins what could have been a decently dramatic moment, and was the straw that broke the camel's back.
I could have liked this book. A few minor changes here and there, and it would have been perfectly fine. It just goes to show, the devil truly is in the details. Mistakes and bad choices turned what could have been a good book into a merely mediocre one.
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