The strengths are the unswerving adherence to the noir model, and fairly well-realized future world.

The protagonist spends most of the book getting beaten up by various lowlifes, going without sleep, being haunted by past horrors, drinking, having shootouts with other lowlifes, reluctantly having sex with various bombshells who throw themselves at him, and pulls all the various unrelated clues together in a "it's all one big case!" insight. If you like all those cliches, you'll like this book.

The worldbuilding is fairly strong; several hundred years in the future humanity has redefined itself beyond physical self. Individuals are stored on small chips and flit from body to body as finances allow. Morgan never really explains how anyone is identified: without any physical cues tying you to an identity, how does it work? And in general, how does that change the importance of your name or individuality? The language is a bit overwrought but fairly tasty with futurespeak. And the plot moves things along nicely. The noir plot stamps nicely onto the cyberpunk genre, and it's clear Morgan is in this for a long haul of books with this character.

But there are a couple of problems. There is a short and out of context action sequence in the prologue that is never really explained at all. It's not clear whether this is supposed to set the scene for the disorientation of the protagonist or is just poorly explained. And the characters seem to vacillate between "I'm bad to the bone" and "aw, I've got a conscience after all" speeches. Finally, Morgan seems to suffer from 'Philip Pullman' syndrome where early references to problems in the plot with the church build through the novel to a character basically turning to the audience and saying "The Catholic Church is an evil stone-age frankenstein of an organization who's existence is a blight on humanity". And it's never 'religion' or any other faith that's mentioned, it's always specifically "The Catholic Church". It's off-putting and strange.

Other than those last annoyances, I'd say it's a tolerable read. ( )

A great book, lots of action, perhaps some may say gratuitious, however, it really did make the story. Think of this as a combo of Blade Runner's setting and some of the action with some detective and Bruce Willis' Die Hard level of action, and Josey Wale's thirst for revenge. ( )

I love noir. The hard-boiled private eyes, the rich eccentric clients, the femme fatales, the verbal sparring, the whole bit. I also love sci-fi, for the way it opens the story up to possibilities of what could be. You put them together, and you get something really amazing. ( )

This book is a blend of science fiction and a traditional detective story and is very well done.

The science fiction part of the story is very original, interesting and just plain cool. (Lots of high-tech - and nearly believeable - concepts of a future where we can store our consciousness in a portable database.)

The detective part of the story is engaging, surprising and hard to put down.

It has R rated language throughout, is very graphic/gory (detailed blood and guts imagery) and has very (VERY) graphic sex scenes (they are definitely adult only - moderate porn level scenes).

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind sex scenes and swear words but the sex (a.k.a. porn) is not interesting and doesn't advance the plot and - the worst part - some of the scenes go on for a very long time. (Perhaps even a bit longer than sex "scenes" in adult magazines would... if you know what I mean.) ( )

My review is here:
http://moosplace.blogspot.com/2009/04... ( )