Redrobe

This one is a lot of fun (and probably shouldn't be). The anti-hero, AXL, is a tangle of self-contradictions that make him not so much complex as convoluted. He has built a reputation for being good at things that no one should ever be good at, and he frequently wants to fail even as he struggles desperately to succeed. The resulting tension kept me turning the pages long after I should have gone to sleep. I'm not sure the plot ever did make sense to me, but I'm fairly confident that the author never intended that it should. While this may violate a fundamental rule of story telling (the whole thing must make some sort of sense in the end), it strikes me as a recognizable -- if distorted -- view of real life. As weird as Grimwood's vision of the future is, it's not any stranger than a world that can produce the likes of Jerry Springer and the infamous 'Bum Fights' videos. If you are a fan of cyberpunk, this is as darkly distopian as it gets. Dress warm, make sure your gun is loaded, and I'll see you on the other side. ;) Jeff Edwards, Author of "Torpedo: A Surface Warfare Thriller"

The gun is a lot of fun, the world is interesting, Axl entertains. It's a Pulp Fiction type of read, with some of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and William Gibson's Neuromancer. While not brilliant -- and not overly deep -- It is good and deep enough, and I enjoyed it enough to buy Grimwood's other release, Remix.

Jon Courtney Grimwood inspires comparison with William Gibson due to his ability to develop highly intense situations and characters with real vitality. However, my first inclinations on reading redRobe were to think of Neal Stephenson and Raymond Chandler, as his characters and the world he paints make one want to explore them. redRobe moves very quickly between the slums of Mexico City and an orbital safe-zone for political refugees, each and all drawn in vivid colors with no time or space allowed for anything close to overfamiliarity. The characters involved range from a gun with AI (not to mention personality) to a dead pope. I hate to give any details, as the story and characters (note how I keep coming back to characters) are best left to unfold as Mr. Grimwood has written them. It evokes the best reaction I can imagine from any fiction, which is to make me want to read everything written by the author. I've followed Cyberpunk from it's inception, and this is some of the best.