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Poison Agendas | 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 | ||
Kellan Colt has been running the Seattle shadows for a while, now, and learnng how to use her magical abilities while she's at it. But she's tired of being someone else's lackey. It's time she take the lead! And its not long before she gets her chance, when a contact tells her of a hidden cache of old military hardware that might be worth a fortune. If she can pull this off, her rep is as good as gold. But there's competition for this prize, and the other guys aren't about to play nice.
As I was reading, I kept asking myself if Kellan could really be so impatient, so stupid, as to beleve herself ready to go off on her own when she's been learning magic for mere months. Apparently so, an attitude that immediately lessened my esteem for her. Sure, she's been a shadowrunner for two years and more, but when it comes to magic she's still a newbie. And most of that time was in Kansas City; even if the shadow community there was as large as Seattle's - and it is repeatedly stated that it is most definitely not - she's still learning the territory. That she considered herself ready to lead a team on a major run in a foreign country made me compare her in my mind to the high school freshman who, upon acing her midterm physics test, considers herself worthy of leading a particle accellerator laboratory. And she feels insulted when all her friends tell her to finish school first. Kellan acts exactly the same, turning her into some whiny teenager instead of an experienced runner.
Beyond that, the book itself has some serious problems. Between Kellan trying to assert her independance, and her attempts to put her own team together, there is remarkably little time left for the run itself. And even less devoted to the consequences when things go wrong, as they inevitably do. Further, for as gritty a setting as Shadowrun is supposed to be, there was very little conflict. This is supposed to be a violent vision of the future, and most Shadowrun books are crammed full of fights and outright battles. But not Poison Agendas. Those few Kenson included were limp, at best, lacking any drama or tension whatsoever, and were all short-lived, lasting only a handful of pages.
Lastly, there is very little progress on the one thing that is meant to tie this new trilogy together. In Born to Run Kellan comes to Seattle in search of news of her mother. In book two the most that happens is she finds someone who claims to have known her. But there is no news of her fate or current whereabouts. There are no leads. And we're not even sure this one person is telling the truth. We know essentially nothing more than we already did, unless you count the pseudonym Kellan's mother ran under.
Poison Agendas ends up feeling much like Shadowrun Light. It's as if this book belongs in the young adult section, not alongside such books as 2XS or Tails You Lose. Combined with how the book is set well before the last events we saw in other novels, it makes this book eminently skippable.
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