Synopsis:
John Wick meets Blade Runner in this fast-paced cyberpunk thriller by the #1 NYT bestselling author of The Will of the Many.
My job, when you think about it, isn’t so different from a lot of people’s. I have to deal with a ton of boring planning. Inconvenient hours. Some pretty awkward face-to-face interactions. And like most of us, I’m really only clocking in to try and crawl out from beneath my debts.
The more old-fashioned crowd do still get hung up on the ‘killing people’ part, I guess, but that’s a them problem: it’s been perfectly legal to take out lifers for ages. Besides, once ultrawealthy morons realised they had a way to live forever—limited resources be damned—there was only ever going to be one genuinely practical deterrent. So someone’s got to do it.
And luckily, my genetic compatibilities make me really, really good at it.
Still. This next job… I don’t know. It’s something I haven’t had to deal with in years. Kind of the opposite of my regular duties. Strange, that it got thrown my way.
I’m sure it’ll all go totally fine though.
Review:
With the Licanius Trilogy and the first two installments in his Hierarchy series, James Islington has established himself as a major player in the fantasy genre. Epic stories with a wide range of characters told over the course of years and realities have become his trademark and those epic fantasies clock in at what might be termed as “chonkers.” After last year’s The Strength of a Few, I imagine there weren’t a lot of people that were expecting Islington to come out with a fast-paced cyberpunk mystery that you can probably finish in an afternoon as his next book, but here we are with today’s release of Scion.
What Scion is though, is a tight, well-plotted, and fun story. In his fantasy novels, Islington sometimes does things you might not have seen before in genre fiction. With Scion, I doubt you’ll see much in the way of ground-breaking plot devices, but Islington offers up a solid story that I had a great time with.
The book is told entirely from the perspective of Azure, a hitman in a futuristic society, ala Blade Runner. He’s the best in the biz, even after suffering an injury on the job that starts the book. He’s tasked with a protection job, but the details of that job reveal a lot about his world, his employer, and even more about himself than he knew. There are plenty of twists and turns as Azure tries to figure out both who his client is and also who is after her.
Once I got into the story, I blazed through it. It’s fast-paced (so much so that Islington doesn’t even break the book into chapters, which is kinda cool but a little frustrating if you lose your place) but also detailed in its plot. Islington is able to take the intense plotlines from his fantasy novels and cram it into a controlled sci-fi story.
One thing to note as well after I’ve read a number of cyberpunk stories. Set in a dystopian future, oftentimes authors make up their own vocabulary for things, which is totally their prerogative. However, sometimes that vocabulary takes over the story and makes understanding the basic plot difficult after figuring out what each sentence is even saying. Islington wisely has some new “cyberpunk-y” words in Scion, but they don’t detract from the overall story and don’t confuse the audience.
I was thrilled to read Scion and am glad to get anything from James Islington. If he needed to get a little sci-fi cyberpunk novel out of his system before book 3 of the Hierarchy series, I’m more than happy to be here for it.
Thank you to Saga Press for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
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