The Digital Plague - Jeff Somers
The Digital Plague - Jeff Somers
Avery Cates is a very rich man. He's probably the richest criminal in New York City. But right now, Avery Cates is pissed. Because everyone around him has just started to die -- in a particularly gruesome way. With every moment bringing the human race closer to extinction, Cates finds himself in the role of both executioner and savior of the entire world.
Book 2 in Somers' Avery Cates series, and I enjoyed it about as much as I enjoyed the first one. It's still not my usual taste, but I can appreciate the way it's written. Mostly. His gunfight scenes (and there are many) really are exquisitely written. Normally one thinks of a gunfight as something you need to watch, because you couldn't possibly just explain it all in words and have it be exciting. Somers actually manages that. He gives you enough description of both the setting and all the players' moves (as far as Cates is aware of them) that you can visualize it very easily (and I don't always visualize very well), but not so much that he gets bogged down in details and loses the pacing of it. It moves fast, it moves well, and he generally makes reading about them just about as good as watching them. Which I do think is an accomplishment. He also, as I mentioned in book 1, manages to make you like the characters even though they're mostly unlikable. I still don't get how he does that.
Something I'm less fond of is his repetitiousness. I don't recall noticing it so much in the first book, but looking back, there were a lot of references to the Unification riots, and pretty much every new setting was described as having been burned in said Unification riots and never rebuilt. There was more of that in this book, with the addition of repeated references to various things arising from the Monk riots. Also, I swear, for the first half of the book, every other chapter mentioned the fact that the System is being run by the Undersecretaries now that the Joint Council has been proven to be a bunch of computers which are now offline. We. Get. It. Stop telling us, for the love of whatever. He's written it in such a way that you're clearly expected to have read the first book, but he still feels the need to remind you repeatedly of what happened in it. So. Annoying. Eventually, that improved, but it really did bug, especially for the first half of the book.
The plague itself was well executed, with the clues building, until you understand the situation. And then the situation is revealed to be even worse, with everyone turning into techno-zombies. That was pretty freaky and gross. Gotta say though, anyone with an impressionable mind at all should probably keep their plague reading to the summer months, because hearing the near-constant now blowing and coughing of winter can make one a little nervous when reading about a virulent killer plague.
I did call (or at least suspect) the twist about Hense fairly early on, but it opens up some more interesting possibilities for future books, so we'll see if that goes anywhere. I was kind of happy about it, too, since I did rather like that character. I was pretty disappointed with Glee's death, though. We didn't really know her too well before she died, but she seemed like there was stuff you could do with her, so it's too bad she had to bite it. I think maybe Somers is nervous about trying to write engaging, human female characters, and that's why he didn't want to keep this one going too long. Well, that and the fact that her death is fairly crucial to various aspects of the story.
Generally, though, it was a fun, pulpy romp through a dystopic universe, that I look forward to returning to in the next installment.
Next up: Interview with the Vampire, by Anne Rice