“[A] fun, noir-tinged thriller…Barber and Ezell weave together intrigue, action, and romance, all with a hard-boiled sensibility…Readers will be hooked.”―Publishers WeeklyAfter a devastating galactic war, disgraced veteran Ralston Muck ekes out a living as a bouncer at Last Stop Station’s premier nightclub, A Curtain of Stars. Night after night he listens to the club’s star performer, Siren, sing … performer, Siren, sing her memories and ease some of his aching loss. But when Siren goes missing, Muck finds himself drawn into a world of dirty cops, drug lords, and conspiracies that trace back to the war itself.
The only person he can trust isn’t even human. Angel, Siren’s personal AI, was ripped from the singer’s mind the night Siren disappeared. With no idea what has happened to her human host, and pursued by a killer virus, Angel flees to Muck for answers.
Together they struggle to comprehend the conspiracy that entangles both their lives. Can Muck and the angel on his shoulder recover Siren before it’s too late? Or will he lose everything that matters to him one more time?
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In Second Chance Angel, a pair of badly damaged combat veterans team up to find the kidnapped woman who is crucial to both of them. One vet was an enlisted grunt. The other was an officer’s artificial intelligence. Vivid action and intelligent backgrounds as the team unravels a criminal conspiracy that goes well above their pay grades.
A war veteran and a disembodied artificial intelligence form a partnership to solve a string of horrible crimes. The human/AI detective theme hasn’t been done this well since Isaac Asimov’s Lije Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw novels, The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, and The Robots of Dawn — with the advantage that the AI science in Second Chance Angel is that of the modern era, not Asimov’s time.
Space opera, sentient AIs, and a mystery to solve. What more can you ask for?
They have a winner in this one. Great book.
This book has great characters and interesting world-building. Think a detective noir novel with AIs as some of the characters. I picked it up for the authors and stayed for the story.
Pretty good read. A little slow at times, but the premise was good.
Boring and then ends with a cliffhanger.
Full disclosure: I received a free copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review, and I stopped reading around the 70% mark and didn’t finish it.
Second Change Angel is one of those unfortunate books that don’t give the reader any roadmap to work on when it comes to characters, time and space—and space. I put the latter in twice, because apparently it takes place in a space station, though we only get a confirmation of that when the main character leaves the place. Until then, we could’ve been on a random planet or a moon just as well.
Time is somewhere in the future after a devastating war with an alien race that has blown up the earth. The war was apparently long, but the earth has been gone for only seven years. Place is a space station that seems to be built to accommodate humans, though not by humans. It’s is so poorly described that all I have are weird, confusing and frustrating impressions that don’t really make any sense when put together.
There are four point of view characters, three of which are AIs. They are very human-like with emotions and petty grievances, and inability to concentrate on more than one task at the time. They are gendered and very stereotypically at that. LEO, a male, is a law enforcement AI and SARA, a female, a station administrative AI. Both behave according to their assumed gender as well. The station AIs have their own mystery plot unfolding concerning a virus or some such that cause their emotions and prevent them from correcting the malfunction. They also provide a bird’s eye view on some characters, so that we learn more than just the main character’s point of view.
The main AI character is a personal AI called Angel. She belongs to a former special ops soldier Siren who works as a lounge singer in a seedy bar. Siren goes missing and somehow Angel ends up in the body of another former soldier who has had his AI removed as a disciplinary measure.
Angel is a female and behaves like one to get her way with her new host, like making him feel like he’s being caressed by her. She’s manipulative and doesn’t hesitate to take over the host’s body when she feels like it with no regard to his right to govern his body. As an AI, she’s a failure. As a narrator, she’s really difficult to follow, because she wavers between I, we, and he when she describes the actions of the body she inhabits.
The only human POV character is Muck, the former soldier whose body Angel invades—uninvited, I might add. We don’t learn anything about him initially, and titbits about his past spring up only when the plot so requires. For example, he needs a rescue on a desert and it so happens that the religious order that saves him is the one he grew up in. Wouldn’t that have made a great starting point for building his character? How does a man who grows up with an order who shuns AI technology end up becoming an AI enhanced soldier?
What about the plot then? Siren goes missing without the knowledge of her AI who somehow gets booted off her body and ends up in Muck’s, so she forces him to investigate the disappearance. Do they start by investigating who might have the technological skills to remove an AI without it noticing? No, they go after the biggest drug baron. Do they search the most obvious places for her, like the station itself? No, they head off the station to a planet the drug baron directs them to. Do they find her there? No.
This is where I stopped reading. The events so far had been so illogical and stupid and filled with out of the blue attacks and pointless detours that I just couldn’t go on anymore. The secondary plot with the station AIs about the virus infecting them might have been more interesting, but they were so annoying characters that I couldn’t really care. The task of making sense of the plot wasn’t made any easier by the narrative that was mostly dialogue between talking heads. Most of the time there was no indication about who was talking, so that I had to actually count the exchanges to figure out who was saying what.
So, all in all, a disappointing experience. Why, then, did I give it three stars? I don’t know. It had some draw that kept me reading despite the difficulties, like the struggle with PTSD Muck and Siren originally dealt with—though that was soon forgotten—and really imaginative aliens—who were all criminals, by the way. And who knows, maybe it redeems itself in the end. I couldn’t make myself finish the book, but I don’t want to rob others the chance to find out by giving the book only two stars. If it improves, let me know.