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Fallen Angels | Rating | |
| B | |||
| 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, Midnight and Orion are going into Tir Tairngire to pull off a minor but lucrative run. But something seems to be calling to Kellan, invading her dreams with images of betrayal and death. It's putting her on edge at a time when she needs to be at the top of her game. Worse, she's about to learn two things: what happened to her mother, and that in the Shadows, learning who to trust can be an expensive - if not fatal - lesson.
One of the first questions I had as I was reading was to wonder when this was supposed to take place. The back of Born to Run said it was 2053, while the back of Poison Agendas listed it as 2063. And so did this one. None of the books actually mention a date, so the back of the book is all readers have to go on - that, and references inside the text itself, and Dunkelzahn's death is mentioned. So if this is 2063 and the back of Born to Run was a typo, then I'm even more disappointed, because the enormous changes brought about at the end of Kenson's own The Burning Time are ignored. Not negated, not explained away, simply ignored. Given that finding out what was going on at the end of that novel was a major part of why I bought this new set of Shadowrun novels, finally realizing for sure that I'll never see the results of it is a disappointment, to say the very least.
Even so, this remains the best of the three opening novels in these new release. For one thing, Kellan is acting neaither like an idiot or a spoiled teenager. She still is a bit naive, and she makes some very poor choices and assumptions, but that's when people are actively working to deceive her. In general terms she comes across largely as a young and cmpetent shadowrunner, if never a brilliant one. Her only real mistake that was all her own was that she never attempted to verify anything she was told.
The overall story is good, too, at least in part because it is significantly more intricate than Kenson's last two works. There are essentially two story threads going on, Kellan being the tie that binds then. Both are complex, filled with the shadowy goals and sifting alliances that characterize the better tales in this series.
They are somewhat offset, however, by how Kellan once again must rely on outside help to get her out of the worst of her troubles. The girl seems constantly and repeatedly to get in over her head, and having to call for help so often greatly diminishes her worth as a character. Further, there was a logical fallacy I just couldn't get past: if this trusted friend and associate wants Kellan's amulet so badly, enough to betray and kill teammates years ago to get it, why doesn't Kellan suffer the same fate? Why isn't she just shot and the amulet ripped from her body? And the revelation, near the end of the book, of the amulet's ultimate power and the use for which it is meant doesn't provide a convincing explanation.
This story wraps up Kellan Colt's trilogy, the opening gambit in WizKids' release of new Shadowrun novels. But it's not exactly a tight triolgy, and it would have been better served as three individual books that starred the same character. That's essentially what they were, anyway; only the fact that they were released all in a row, instead of interspersed with other Shadowrun books, makes me call it a trilogy. Fallen Angels itself isn't an awful novel, and Kenson has eliminated most of the more annoying aspects of the character. It is still something of a disappointment, however, and passing this book by in favor of other stories will not at all harm a newcomer's understanding of the setting.
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