This is my second 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 The Ghost Gun by Gareth Lewis (author site here). The book is available from a wide variety of retailers.

Blurb

The Ghost Gun kills what it hits, its ghost bullets ensnaring the victim’s soul to their killer.

Except that nothing is that simple.

Certainly not an apparently simple theft that leads detectives into a war between secret societies over artifacts which have been around for millennia, their origin unknown, their abilities inexplicable.

Demoted to Vice due to departmental politics, Detective Cassie Kinsala sees an opportunity to restore her career path. But what looks like it might offer a decent arrest soon turns into a quagmire the law might not cover, and might not protect her from.

Jimmy Bancroft used to be a cop. Working for the other side lets him avoid paperwork. Investigating rumours of a competitor moving in on his employer’s interests, he becomes entangled in a war between criminals and a secret society. And someone might be trying to set him up.

My Review

This is an engaging book with a fun central concept, some great buddy-cop dialogue, some hard-core criminal intrigue, and three highly memorable characters.

Plot and Characters

I don’t generally want to spoil stuff when I review, but a lot of the plot setup is in the blurb above, and much of it is revealed in the opening few chapters. There’s a Ghost Gun, a weapon that steals souls. There are shadowy groups – criminals, technologists, cults, splinter cults – all pursuing this gun and the other artifacts like it.

Set against or amongst those shadows, there are three hard-boiled cops, one (Cassie) a battered idealist, one (Harry) who’s mostly given up, and one (Jimmy) who’s come unmoored and switched sides. They each have different approaches to the case of the gun stemming from their own moral codes and from their own history of injury or failure or ambition. As they each learn more about the weird situation they’ve been thrust into, or thrust themselves into, they respond in authentic, logical, deductive ways, as befit detectives.

My Thoughts

This is an exciting book. It is one of our shorter ones in our group, and it is paced well, giving new information into plot, characters, and mysteries in nearly every chapter. The plot feels fresh and follows a central mystery – what this gun is, what it does, how it works, and who the weird groups are who are trying to control and exploit it. There are a LOT of cop-show-style gun battles, some exciting, some tragic, some magic. Even where the book wanders into some tropey places, it maintains a newness and an energy that give life and imagination to those tropes.

The big strength of the book for me is the dialogue between cops (or ex-cops). It’s real, grounded, and a lot of fun. These are characters on various stages of the road toward bitterness and resignation, and they talk with intelligence, sass, and mutual admiration laced with sarcasm. That never stops being fun.

“I’m not dumb enough to shoot a cop.”

“I’m unconvinced as to your level of dumbness.”

For me, the setting was indistinct from the start, despite its familiarity, and it didn’t gel even pretty far into the book. I was imagining a near-future world – not quite Neuromancer, but on the way there. I was wrong, I think. There are mentions of Netflix and Google, which anchor it in the present, and there are cell phones with SIM cards. There’s no technology that seems too far out there (although one character seeming to think something was a complex hologram led me to think such things existed in this world).

The location was fuzzy, too. The cops’ language is often British flavored, with plural verbs for corporations or organizations (e.g. sentences like “Coca-Cola have started a new advertising campaign”) and with some Britishisms, although the police ranks and roles seemed American. The character names were suited to either an American or British setting. For a long time, I knew only that it wasn’t Russia, because there was a reference to a Russian district. I thought it might be some indistinct future city. It wasn’t until 85% of the way through the book that somebody mentions this stuff happening “in an American city.” Still unnamed, but at least I knew it was America for sure for the last few chapters.

There was one big piece of fuzziness in the characters, too. One of the detectives was referred to as Black by another about halfway through the book. Her race is never mentioned before or after, and there’s no discussion of how it’s impacted her life or career. There didn’t need to be such discussion, of course, but it was strange not to know, and I think racism might realistically have been a frame for her troubles at the department – not necessarily one she’d personally put blame on, but one she’d likely consider. I had to reread that part to make sure they were talking about the same person and not a new detective. I guess the surname Kinsala might have been a tip, but not one I picked up on.

There were a small number of editing issues. Nothing major (like, maybe ten instances), and certainly no more than you’d see in a traditionally published book, but my author eye sees these in others’ work while somehow remaining tragically blind to them in my own. The perspective was at times a little floaty. Most of the scenes are squarely in the perspective of a single character, one of the major three, but when they get together, it occasionally pans out to omniscient, and we get inner thoughts from multiple characters in the same scene, sometimes alternating by paragraph. It works here, because we’ve spent time in these characters’ heads and they’re familiar, and it’s a valid choice of construction, but it is something we’re often taught to avoid in writing seminars.

There were a small set of moments that felt info-dumpy, especially a conversation with a lore-rich elder, but that’s hard to avoid in a story where the main characters don’t know how things work. I didn’t have a problem with it even as I saw it happening. There was an experimentation scene that seemed natural, and it had an outcome that was pretty funny and lasted for much of the rest of the book.

There’s a clear story arc here that ends within the book, even though this seems to be a series, with the plucky and intrepid Detective Kinsala carrying on the story in future books. Although the central conflict was resolved, I felt like a lot of things were still in motion, including a not-too-subtle teaser for the next book. That’s the nature of series, I guess, but I might have liked to have more of it nailed down – another scene a week later, maybe, to see how the characters are coping, would have been enough.

This being a sci-fi competition, I should acknowledge that there wasn’t a lot of traditional sci-fi here. It is totally (and gloriously) speculative fiction, but there aren’t many strictly sci-fi parts. That quibble is not at all relevant to the book, which does what it is trying to do very well, but it might be relevant to the competition.

I realize I’ve now done a thing I hate in reviews as an author, where I’ve written two positive paragraphs and then five or six nit-picky ones. I absolutely don’t mean to give an impression I didn’t like this book – I did, and the promise I saw in it in the opening slush read in the competition was paid off in the full book. I really enjoyed the characters – I found them real, flawed, struggling, and entertaining to follow. I’d totally be down to follow Cassie Kinsala through further adventures. The ghostly artifacts were neat, and the rules they followed and the unintended impacts they caused were creative and fun.

Summation

In summary, then, this was a good, creative book that kept me entertained throughout. It has a cynical but realistic-seeming view of the police and what challenges people face during a long and grinding career. It has great, snappy dialogue, both in the banter and in the more serious conversations. It tells you what you need in terms of world-building without wading too deep into it to the point of getting dull or pedantic. Lewis is an imaginative, skilled author. He has a ton of books out, starting over fifteen years ago, so there’s a lot there to dig into.