Shovel Ready (Adam Sternbergh)

The first-person narrator of this book scrabbles a living in a dark, dangerous post-apocalyptic New York City. He calls himself Spademan, a name with two meanings. He once was, he tells us over and over, a garbage man, back when the city worked and people came and took away your garbage. Now, he is a killer for hire, one with strict rules about not knowing why you want someone killed, only that you're willing to pay for it. When someone points him at the estranged daughter of a famous evangelist, he starts to have second and third thoughts and winds up being drawn deeper and deeper into a morass of murder, torture, and terror as he tries to do the right thing. It is surprisingly easy to like this protagonist because we never see him acting in his primary occupation as a cold-blooded murderer; we only see him as someone who has become the unlikely defender of the young and helpless. With its intense action and its spare style (short, incomplete sentences and one-line paragraphs abound) this story moves quickly, almost breathlessly. Recommended.

The Automatic Detective (A. Lee Martinez)

I checked this out on impulse - I saw it while waiting in line at the library for a different book - and I'm glad I did. It is unpretentious and a lot of fun. The hero is a giant android built for war who develops the "sentience glitch" and becomes self-aware, refusing his creator's orders to kill. The society where he lives is full of sentient machines as well as drones, those who strictly follow their programming, and they grant him probation. If he can avoid any problems for a limited period of time, he'll be granted citizenship. As the story opens, though, he gets embroiled in a drama involving a neighbor family that is kidnapped, and it brings him up against the police, the government, and an extra-governmental force that doesn't have humanity's best interests at heart. Of course, all comes out well in the end, but the ride is fun. There's no great literature here, but the writing is zesty and the story engaging.

Cinnamon and Gunpowder (Eli Brown)

I enjoyed this rollicking pirate yarn with a twist. The narrator is a chef, employed by a shipping magnate who is murdered by pirates, and the chef himself is kidnapped. The pirate captain is a wild and forceful woman who decides to keep the chef alive if he will provide her with one sumptuous meal per week from the inadequate materials at hand on her ship. Many adventures ensue, punctuated with the unlikely meals he concocts from unpromising supplies. The story is largely predictable, but told with humor and even tenderness, despite the occasionally gruesome violence.

Lost (Michael Robotham)

This exciting mystery-thriller opens with a police detective pulled from the Thames with a bullet hole in his leg. He spends 8 days in a coma and wakes up with no memory of the days before his injury. The rest of the story outlines his fight to remember what happened, starting only from his belief that it has something to do with the kidnapping and apparent murder of a 9-year-old girl three years before. I liked the main character, a flawed but determined fighter for lost children, and the supporting characters were also interesting and well drawn. The action, with its many twists, held me, and I liked the dimension of his amnesia (as someone with an interest in memory, it felt real to me). I'll read more by this author.

Spyder Web (Tom Grace)

This story of industrial espionage on a grand scale is full of thrills and adventure, and I was interested enough in what would happen next to keep reading, but I have to say it didn't really grab me. A lovely freelance reporter who digs up secrets for the right price discovers something called the Spyder, an experimental device that can lurk on someone's network, locate any information on any computer connected to the network, and send that information out to its handler without detection. She finds an interested buyer, a sinister Chinese agent, and this begins a contest that involves former KGB agents, daring SEALs, computer hackers, and high-speed explosions on land and water. The characters never really came alive for  me, but it was fun anyway.

Dead Aim (Thomas Perry)

Mallon is a retired builder who has lots of money but no real life - he spends his days walking aimlessly along the Santa Barbara shore. One day he sees a young woman walk into the ocean, and he pulls her out and tries to convince her not to take her own life. A few days later he finds out he failed, and becomes obsessed with finding out who she was and why she believed she had to die. His search takes him to an exclusive self-defense school in the mountains, and from there he finds himself fighting for his life. The action is gripping, and the author made it almost plausible that the mild-mannered protagonist could succeed over a cadre of highly-trained killers. I enjoyed it.

Arctic Rising (Tobias Buckell)

The plot of this story was interesting and kept me turning pages. In the fairly near future, global warming has melted the ice caps and opened the entire arctic circle to settlement and shipping. Lots of groups are exploring and exploiting this region, including those who want to do things like dump various waste products. The UN has airships in the area watching for this, but one gets shot down, and its pilot barely survives. She finds herself hunted and threatened, and is nearly killed several more times as she tries to unravel the mystery of what's going on at the pole. With the help of various shady characters, she uncovers a nest of competing conspiracies between those fighting to save the world from ecological disaster and those who just want to exploit it, and it turns out that neither of these is really the good guy. Things are very exciting, but none of the characters ever felt very real to me, partly because the dialogue never rang true. A good thriller, though.

Shadow Woman (Thomas Perry)

A worthy third novel in the Jane Whitefield series. Jane has decided to quit her occupation of making people disappear, but there is one last job she has to do. Pete Hatcher is a hapless middle manager in a Las Vegas casino who has suddenly become the target of some very scary professional assassins, and he has turned to Jane for a way out. As usual, it winds up being more difficult than she ever expected, and nearly costs not only her life but the lives of people she cares about. She is victorious, though, because she is tough and smart and uses the opportunities offered to her. I hope her future life goes well.

Dance for the Dead (Thomas Perry)

This second book in the Jane Whitefield series is even better than the first. The story begins with Jane helping to protect a little boy against the forces that want him dead for unknown reasons. As Jane keeps fighting for him, she gets involved with a second client, who needs to get away from men who want to kidnap her, also for unknown reasons. As she peels away the layers of deception and greed, she gets to a central enemy whose stunning brutality is threatening them both and, eventually, Jane herself. My only disappointment in this story is that the climactic scene is not shown from Jane's perspective. This heightens the suspense, but I did miss the chance to watch her mind work. She is an amazingly smart, principled, kick-ass woman, a hero for everyone of any gender.

Altered Carbon (Richard Morgan)

This blend of cyberpunk SF and hardboiled noir detective novel worked for me. Although I sometimes lost the thread of a very complex plot with lots of characters, the strength of the main characters and the fascinating action kept me engaged. Kovacs is a man with many special skills, including guns, martial arts, empathy bordering on psi, and conditioning to deal with blood-freezing torture others would need years of therapy to get over. He is bloodthirsty but also has a core of loyalty and compassion. He lives in a world where people's personal identity can be stored indefinitely and downloaded with ease into a new body, either a synthetic one or one from whom someone else's personality has been extracted. He was put in storage for committing what others defined as a crime, and wakes up on another planet in a strange body, revived by an ancient man of limitless wealth to solve his murder. Along the way he meets whores, drug dealers, prize fighters, cynical police officers, and gangster bosses: all the familiars of detective stories, weirdly morphed by the future they live in. There is a lot of violence, but there's a central humanity that kept it from becoming too dark for me.

Ready Player One (Ernest Cline)

This is a story for young adults, focusing on a massively multiplayer online game, that I really enjoyed. The protagonist is a young man in a bleak future world where the environment, the economy, and the nation are all falling apart, but at least there is this really wonderful online world you can go to where things are much better. The creator of this world has just died, and left all his billions to whoever can solve a series of puzzles using clues he buried inside the world. Because the popular culture of the 1980s was his passion, all the games and clues are based on comic books, video games, TV shows, and movies of that era, so it's a lot of fun for those of us who remember that decade! The antagonist in the story is pretty cardboard: an evil multinational corporation bent on stifling all individuality and turning the game world into a cash cow, and not above torture and murder to get the prize. On the other hand, the protagonist and his friends are rather amazingly good. Still, I enjoyed the action and the rapid-fire cultural references. Fun!

The Forever War (Joe Haldeman)

This is a classic, from 1974, but it is still compelling. The central character is one of the first drafted into interstellar war in the early 2005, and with all the relativistic time-dilation effects, he makes it to the end of the war in 3143. Along the way technology and human nature both change, but he remains much the same, giving the reader a consistent viewpoint with which to view time going by. It is a combination of war story, with high-casualty battles and high-tech weaponry (with few false steps to remind us that it was written before ubiquitous computers and the Internet), and social commentary. I enjoyed it a lot.

Vanishing Act (Thomas Perry)

It's interesting to read a novel where some scenes take place here in Rochester, on streets I often drive! The story centers on a woman, native to the Seneca tribe, who works as a guide - helping people disappear. Her clients include woman escaping abusive spouses and small-time criminals who run afoul of big-time ones. In this story, she helps an ex-policeman who is being framed for embezzlement, but as events unfold we find that not everything is what it seems. She is smart and committed and resourceful and skilled, and I enjoyed the book very much.

Reamde (Neal Stephenson)

Wow.  This book is massive (1042 pages in hard cover) but it never slows down. I was about a third of the way through when I realized is was expecting it to end shortly because it felt like the grand climax. After that, it just kept ratcheting the intensity higher and higher. Reamde is the name of a computer virus designed to siphon cash out of players in a hugely popular multiplayer world. The virus triggers a sequence of events dragging in the developer of this world, his niece, Russian mobsters, Islamic terrorists, Chinese hackers and a tea distributor, American fundamentalists, M16 agents, and sundry others before all is done. The plot is insanely complicated and intricately worked out, and it grabbed me by the throat and wouldn't let go. If you like thrillers with lots of intelligent characters, and lots of detail about computers, guns, boats, and undercover operations, you will love this one.

The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins)

I wanted to read this book to find out what everyone was talking about. It was better than I expected; I actually did get caught up in the story of survival, and I enjoyed reading it. A 16-year-old girl in a brutal, post-apocalyptic world volunteers to take her young sister's place in an annual spectacle in which 24 teens are dropped into a vast arena and forced to fight to the death on live TV. The plot is rather far-fetched, even for science fiction, and the characters and dialogue rather flat and unconvincing. There was altogether too much emphasis on food and clothing for my taste. Still, I liked the tough, ass-kicking heroine.

Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson)

This is a big book with an amazing number of threads: math, computers, cryptography, World War II, treasure hunting, data security, hacking, and more. At first, the two halves of the story (WWII and present day) seem connected only by the last names of some of the characters and the general theme of cryptography, but by the end everything has come together. I enjoyed all the science geekery, presented in a way that is accessible but also accurate, and was completely caught up in the personal stories of loyalty, trust, and love. Highly recommended.

The Tiger (John Vaillant)

This carefully researched true story about the hunt for a man-eating tiger in far-eastern Russia is engrossing and moving. Woven in with the story of what made this tiger stand out and how it was hunted is the history of Russia and particularly its far East rim, the natural history of tigers, and the complex and changing relationship between humans and tigers in the ancient forests. What was most amazing, aside from the sheer nail-biting adventure of it, was that the author managed to portray all sides in the story with even-handed empathy. Highly recommended.

The Sea of Monsters (Rick Riordan)

This second book in the Olympians series lives up to the standards of the first one, delivering action, humor, and relationships in about equal parts. Percy, who discovered in the first book that the ancient gods are real and he is the son of Poseidon, now must go on a dangerous, unauthorized quest to save the camp that protects other half-bloods like him and the life of his satyr friend. This series is aimed at young adults, so its story is somewhat less complex and nuanced than others, but it emphasizes the eternal truths of most fiction, at least the fiction I like: bravery, friendship, honesty, and resourcefulness will win through in the end. I quite enjoyed it and will read others in the series.

The Atrocity Archives (Charles Stross)

This is Stross's first published novel, and it's a delightful geekfest, encompassing everything from Pinky and the Brain to the Church-Turing conjecture and Knuth's fourth book, which was written but classified. The basic idea is that some advanced forms of computation destroy entropy rapidly (tying in with the Gleick book I read recently), which tunnels through to another universe and, depending on the details, summons anything from a demon you can control to a universe-destroying monster. Shannon meets Lovecraft! The narrator is part of a super-secret British agency, part James Bond and part ISO 9000, triplicate form bureaucracy, trying to protect reality from this kind of thing. How can a geek like me not love a book where the hero works in an office of twisty little cubicles, all alike? (If that means nothing to you, you'll miss half of what the author tosses out in this novel.) I enjoyed it quite a lot.

Daemon (Daniel Suarez)

Matthew Sobol, a brilliant computer genius and online game designer, dies and unleashes the Daemon - an autonomous, web-based system that resides in bazillions of fragments distributed around the world, reading newsfeeds and responding to events in ways that he had pre-programmed, to make the world into what Sobol wanted. For example, he doesn't like spammers, so they are murdered in their thousands, and while I approve of the goal, I strongly disapprove of his methods. The Daemon is untraceable and unstoppable, because it is everywhere and nowhere and none of its many minions know its plans or what their part in those plans are. They get messages that, for instance, they are to go to X location, pick up an object from Y person, attach it to another object they already had, and deliver to Z person, and they never know why. I found the book frustrating, since the characters who were sympathetic and positive stand against the Daemon, but the overall message seemed to be that the Daemon is not only inevitable but is in fact a force for good overall. There's a cold calculus we are expected to accept, that the horrific murder of thousands (and the collateral deaths of more thousands who are in the wrong place at the wrong time) is OK because if the Daemon doesn't take over there will be a worse calamity in some abstract future. I also had trouble with the idea that one man's genius could really be that awesomely perfect, to have anticipated so much and planned in such detail as to be completely unstoppable. While the details of the technology are no doubt accurate and could really happen, no system is that perfect and free of bugs and glitches! So while I am glad I read this, and it gave me some interesting ideas to talk about, I didn't really enjoy it or buy it completely..