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Night's Pawn | Rating | |
| B | |||
| Tom Dowd | |||
| 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 | ||
Jason Chase was in Special Forces, and afterwards was a bodyguard. He's mostly retired, now, though. But when one of his favorite ex-clients begs him for help, claiming some people want to kill her big shot father, how can he say no? And thus Chase is surrounded once more by magic and guns, political maneuvers and corporate intrigue. And, it seems, an old enemy he thought he'd left behind him forever.
This is a fine book, for the most part, albeit never a spectacular one. Chase is a likeable characer with a past, as well as some of the contacts and mental baggage that past comes with. He's not a very deep character, and certainly no deep thinker, but he's as deep as he needs to be to feel real. But the rest of the cast felt very shallow indeed. I can understand the author leaving Chase's past largely hinted at, but as a result we learn almost nothing about the characters he interacts with. The main exception, of course, is Cara, the girl who asked for his help after twelve years absence. But thanks to those twelve years, there is a profound disconnect between what Chase, and the readers, know she was like and what she is now in the world of 2053. This was intentional, sor of; Cara is a bit close to her chest about what those years did to her. But the result was that she became just another near-nothing, a character whose actions we can never quite predict.
There are similar problems with the plot. It's not bad, really, in and of itself. It's just that we've seen it done elsewhere, and better. There is a nice twist near the end, one that readers will have a tough time anticipating on the first read-through but makes sense once it is revealed. But it's hardly enough.
There's not much to distinguish this book from the other Shadowrun books out there. It's the same old stuff. But at least it's done well.
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