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The Burning Time | 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 | ||
Tommy Talon and his team have a job. They need to get a certain disguised chip to a low level corper, and let him slot it. It should be easy, as the guy is obsessed with sims and will pop any chip he gets his hands on. But things keep getting in the way. Talon is distracted because he thinks he's seen an old lover that's been dead for years. Trouble is distracted by her feelings for Talon. There's a corporate investigator whose conviction their target is up to no good is threatening to throw a wrench in the works. Gallow is out there, eager for a rematch with Talon, and Mama has plans of her own. And through it all, magic has begun to act... strange.
This is one of those stories that probably sounded great in the conception phase maybe even in outline, but doesn't turn out so well once it's written out. The problem first crops up at the start of the book, which can best be described as scattered. There's a lot of trails to track, characters to follow. It doesn't really get moving until the plot it unveiled at last, a hundred pages in.
Which is another problem I had with this. The reader is kept in the dark for a long, long while as to what Talon's task actually is. Get the chip into this guy's head, got it. But why? And while there are hints that this is only step one, nothing is mentioned of what the further steps are, nor of what the eventual goal might be, until things finally get rolling. Those first hundred pages, as a result, lack any focus.
But worst of all was the second half of the book. One of Kenson's trademarks, it seems, is for the story to take a wildly different tack in its second half as some plot twist or crucial bit of information is revealed, and The Burning Time holds true to form. Unfortunately, this part is a rehash of an earlier Shadowrun book. But while it's a short - but important - part of Never Deal With a Dragon, Kenson turns it into a major portion of his novel. Yet everything Talon does, we'd already seen Sam Vernor do. It's practically a repeat performance with a new cast. It would have been nice, not to mention wise, had the author picked some more original scenario to play out.
The book isn't a total loss, however. It was easy to read, and even moderately fun. I never stopped wanting to see what would happen next. Just how would the confrontation between Talon and Gallow go down this time? Just what is happening to produce these strange magical manifestations? And just what is Mama up to? These questions, and a few others, should be more than enough to keep readers turning these pages.
But the vague first half, and the repetetive second, hurt the book badly. Especially the second. Kenson might have considered it an homage or a tie-in, but to me it just lasted too long for it to be graced with such forgivable labels. To me, it was a copy, and that is unpardonable. Kenson really should have created some other scheme for his heroes to be pitted against.
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