Tuesday, April 2, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Made to Kill by Adam Christopher




Made to Kill is a short novel by Adam Christopher, the first in his "Ray Electromatic Mysteries" series of short novels (all of which are a little over 200 pages, except for a just over 100 page novella).  The book is a take on classic noir, taking place in an alternate 1960s Los Angeles, featuring a detective/hitman as its protagonist with just one little genre twist: its hero and narrator is a robot.

The result is a fun short novel, which I consumed as a nice short under 7 hour audiobook (the audiobook reader is pretty solid), but which never really did more than make me smile just a little bit.  It's a solid novel with some fun running gags and situations, but the plot is a bit predictable and the gags were most definitely beginning to be a bit grating by the end, so I doubt I'll track down the sequels.  But if you're looking for short fun in a noir package, you could do worse than "Made to Kill."


------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------------
Raymond "Ray" Electromatic is the last robot - after the government trashed all of them due to popular outcry - and publicly he works as a P.I. in Hollywood Los Angeles, as he was designed to by his creator.  Except he was reprogrammed by his AI Secretary Ada, and now really works as a hitman for hire, doing jobs day by day, with his memory and power needing replacement every 24 hours.  It's a good life.

And then a mysterious young woman, almost a girl, appears, with a bag full of bars of gold, and a request to kill a popular movie star, right before a nationwide special movie premiere that is all the talk of the town.  Ray takes the job because money is money, and hey he can always track down the woman to kill her to keep his secrecy after its done.  But what he finds on this job is a conspiracy with deadly implications for the entire United States and that even he, the world's last robot, may be over his head.
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If you've ever read noir, you can pretty much know what you're getting with Made to Kill.  As usual you get the detective in his office to start the story, with a young sexy mysterious femme fatale coming into the office with a job he tries to refuse before eventually taking it.  The fact that our protagonist is a robot doesn't change the template really at all with one exception: our hero's inability to remember things from day to day and reliance upon his AI ally Ada is a neat little quirk.

It is a pretty well done version of this template though, with Ray being a solid lead character for this gag, and the Hollywood setting is rather amusing.  The conspiracy also has a fun sci-fi twist to it in how it works, and the plot goes in some fun and occasionally surprising directions - although it is also predictable in many ways.  More importantly, it is rather fun - this is not a "dark" noir story - although the book isn't exactly jokey to much of an extent.

Still, the book probably ended at just the right time, because some of the running gags, most notably Ray's repeated use of human idioms and then making an immediate comment about how he couldn't do those things because he's a robot, were starting to get old and annoying fast.  The rest of the series isn't out in audiobook, so I probably won't continue the series, but as a stand alone, it does work and I don't regret reading it.  It's just not very special, that's all, even if it was fun.
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