Bear Flag Blog

Crossover, Breakaway, and Killswitch by Joel Shepherd - 6/10

A trilogy of far-future science fiction novels which focus on Cassandra Kresnov, a cutting-edge gynoid, built for combat, who has decided that although she's really, really good at it, combat's not really what she wants to do. So she 'retires' to a high-tech, hacker-oriented planet and - surprise! - finds herself allied to the SWAT-team analogue and in combat all the time.

I read all three of these books, but just barely. At no point was I highly enthused to see what happened next. The characters were not cardboard but they were pretty shallow, having obvious motivations but nothing deeper. And the plot - goodness, the plot. It was the classic "drunkard's walk" where stuff happened and then other stuff happened and suddenly some other stuff is happening and none of it seems anticipated, much less foreshadowed. The characters would be investigating something and then it would be combat time and then they'd go chasing off after somebody else for no reason that a reader could readily ascertain.

Shepherd writes pretty good combat sequences, and his prose flows well, but the books lacked the structural elements of literature that really make a book worth reading.