This is my fourth review of a full read for the Peripheral Prospectors judging team for SPSFC#4. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is Da Vinci on the Lam by B.D. Booker. The book is available from Amazon.

A note on my judging for Peripheral Prospectors: We split up the team’s books between us, because six quarterfinalists was a lot to get through (although one judge did manage to read them all). We made sure each book got a fair shake – all quarterfinalists got at least three full reads and ratings from our six judges. I was not able to get through all six before the deadline as I had hoped, but I intend to read and review the other two quarterfinalists I didn’t get to yet (Whiskey and Warfare and Afterburn) regardless of which of our six progresses to the semifinals.

Blurb

One week. One chance. Earth is dying as a fungal ‘grit’ and dust storms smoother crop lands and destroy the oceans. The rich flee into space, leaving the poor to die off. But if gunslinger Artis Quinn delivers a priceless da Vinci artwork to an offworlder hub on the other side of the country, his family will get tickets off-world. Yet the true end of the world might arrive sooner than expected and Quinn will have to fight his way through the ruthless Onyx Group to succeed.

My Review

This was an exciting, grueling tale, set on a dying Earth, with humanity on the brink of extinction. The near-future mentioned shows a not-too-recognizable America in the midst of a climate collapse, with food supplies failing, technology rusting away, the political system in chaos and corruption, and people living and dying in hardship, although some lucky few have the money to live in domes or still have real food, and a rarefied elite make it off-world to colonies on other planets.

This is the setting. The core of the story, though, is something else, played out across this desolate landscape. At its heart, it’s a very long chase, with our heroes (semiheroes, at least) Artis and Julia trying to spirit away a stolen Da Vinci sketch while the previous owners try to recover it, not because they like art, but because somebody even more important than they are want it.

Plot and Characters

I kind of did the plot above, and there’s actually not too much more to say. The book alternates POV characters from good guys to bad guys to shadowy bosses, but it always returns to showing what the good guys are doing to try to achieve their goals (which turns out to be a huge variety of crafty stuff) and what the bad guys are doing to try to thwart them (which involves a host of spy-ish stuff and advanced tech).

The two leads, Julie and Artis, are a fun pair to follow. They’re both full and realistic (at least in this world) and their backstories get fleshed out as the book progresses. Their motivations are complex and shifting, and they form a bond and partnership together that’s engaging and fun. Artis is an archetype – a world-weary ex-special-forces drifter who’s a complete badass, the kind of character Sylvester Stallone would both act and direct himself in a 1980’s movie that got 2.5 stars. But Artis is deeper than that, with some real charm, some fallibility, and lots of regrets.

Julie’s a little softer focused – she gets less POV time – but her shifting loyalties and her fish-out-of-water experience are interesting and well done. She has crises of conscience that seem real as her basic mission becomes a lot more complicated, and as the costs mount.

The bad guys aren’t as well developed, as they’re kind of locked into being part of the bad guy team, and they don’t have a lot of agency other than to follow orders or die. A couple of them get a lot of POV time, but most of that is them just being fooled or seeing through ruses. We get pretty deep into a kind of middle management bad guy, Big, but to be honest, he’s not that interesting, and he too is basically just doing what he’s told and what he has to. The other baddie we see more of is Aveev, but he gets repetitive rather than deep. There were multiple scenes of him thinking hard, valuing and assessing his soldiers, and regretting that he was lying to them. About the fifth time he has a chapter like that, without much new, it gets a little stale, because his motivations and mission haven’t changed, and he hasn’t developed.

My Thoughts

The big win here is the desolate world, full of people barely hanging on. We gradually learn more about how this happened, but basically the world is covered in “grit,” a fungal dust that ruins crops and foods and infests everything it touches. There are elements of Mad Max and other broken-world futures in here, but this is fresh and told well, with little vignettes and encounters with colorful wasteland folks. I liked this part, seeing how various people were finding work, keeping alive, and dealing with severe hardship. The various adaptations people have made to handle the gritstorms and starvation are interesting, as is the social stratification we sometimes see.

The plot is exciting, too – very action-movie-ish, with escapes and mad dashes and crappy vehicles barely holding together and gun fights and trains and cannibals and cool shenanigans. All of this is good stuff, but the problem I had was that, while this was a cool action movie, it felt like a four-and-a-half-hour action movie, one where the plot didn’t change much at all from start to finish. The characters grew and developed, and some stuff was going on in the world, but the clever-ploy/evil-scheme tennis match went well into extra games, and my neck got tired. There started to be some cheats to increase drama, too – stuff that the characters knew but weren’t telling us, making them unreliable, and cheapening the tension a little when we found out. Also some seemingly uncharacteristic own-goals from the good guys and unrealistic “Aha! I’m here when I couldn’t possibly be” moments frmo the bad guys. But in the end, it was satisfying. The end was maybe a little contrived (and oddly rushed after so much stasis), but I enjoyed the journey, even if I might have preferred a shorter route.

There were occasionally some info-dumpy parts about the world. Booker usually does a good job of revealing these things in the characters’ voices, but sometimes it’s clear he just wants us to know how stuff works and is going to spend a page or two telling us. It’s cool stuff, so that’s forgivable, and it mostly reads fine. There are a few times where an aspect of the world is told over again, even three or four times, when it’s already been detailed earlier, and that can get frustrating, especially in a long book.

In terms of writing, the worldbuilding and the characterization of the leads are great, the dialogue snaps, and the detail is rich and interesting. The editing is a little rough, with more grammar and structure errors than you’d see in a traditionally published book. A fair number of comma splices (though not nearly as many as Transference), some word errors (characters repeatedly pouring over things, riff raft, etc.) and such. Not enough to detract from what is at its heart a good book, but something maybe to work on in a 2nd edition or rerelease.

Summation

I enjoyed my time with this. The fundamental lunacy of two people worrying about a 15th century scrap of art as the world is ending is a lot of fun, and the writing was cinematic in a good way. I really liked the main character throughout – he has a great world-weary badass thing going. I thought it was longer than it should be, and a bit repetitive, but I’ve been known to eat more cake than I should at times, and even where this dragged a bit, it tasted good.