Following the meeting with Bancroft, I had gone back to the and slept for almost twenty hours.

“ The other one just stared at me the whole time as if he hadn’t eaten red meat recently. A profound lack of interest in Bancroft’s problems washed through me.” His thoughts at his first meeting with Bancroft: “ The thought of scrolling through hundreds of meters of incoherent vitriol from the lost and losers of this antique world was quite sufficient to uncap my weariness again. Kovacs’s personality is exceptionally realized, managing to convey a weary and cynical personality who still harbors glimmers of hope and altruism. Morgan achieves classic, sophisticated hard-boiled noir in a futuristic setting. Investigation will take him from deluxe personality storage companies to the slums and brothels of Earth.

The first hint things aren’t on the level is when he checks into his hotel (complete with artificial intelligence) and someone attempts to abduct him. Bancroft, bored and beautiful society wife. Before he leaves the estate, Kovacs has a run-in with Mrs. Bancroft gives Kovacs carte blanche to discover his killer. Although the local police have shut the case, calling it a suicide, Bancroft knows his personality is backed-up every two days, and with six clones on standby, suicide is pointless. Laurens Bancroft, three hundred and fifty year-old mogul, wants Kovacs to find out who killed his prior body. While his personality is imprisoned in the ‘stacks,’ he is bought and downloaded to a new body on Earth and offered the deal of a lifetime. There’s hints that the cumulative trauma of ambiguous morality eventually led him to turning those skills to a life of crime. Kovac is a man of special skills: after leaving the military, he became an Envoy, an elite member of tactical peace-keeping force. Merge that plot and character with innovative science fiction–digitized personalities that can be downloaded into new bodies with the right reasons or enough cash, and the result is eminently readable.Ī fast summary for those who are entirely new to the book (and for my poor, over-tasked memory): Takeshi Kovacs, most recently of Harlan’s World, has been killed in his latest caper. Picture a hard-boiled noir, the solitary, weary worldly detective, blunted emotional skills, stepping on toes as he investigates. A fun and fast-paced thrill ride, almost impossible for me to put down.

Richard k morgan books