So, a while back, CT Phipps reached out and asked me if I'd be interested in reading his new book Moon Cops on the Moon! I told him I'd ordered a copy, but it was behind a library book in to TBR pile. Then employment got crazy, and finding time to read got a bit odd, but....I read it.
So, first thing to note, this is evidentially a shared setting with a few other series he's written, although this one is set further in the past than the other ones. Which is fine, since I'm kind of wanting to read other books in this setting now. Second, It helps if one has a mildly twisted sense of humor to read this particular volume, since it's very much what would happen if say, Dashiell Hammett wrote Shadowrun novels. (For those of you not up on such esoterica and are too lazy to google, he wrote several hardboiled detective novels, including The Maltese Falcon.)
Anyway, we open on our narrator, Neal Gordon, as he's getting ready to land on the moon to start his new assignment with Ares Electronics as a police officer. (Like much cyberpunk, much of what is civil service here in the present is private in the future. Neal has a lifetime contract. But at least the Moon is somewhat better than Antarctica.) Problem being that as soon as he lands, everyone, from the cybermen to the 90 year old woman landing with him, want him dead or alive. He winds up getting rescued by his new partners, Miss Lucy Westerna and a Corgi AI named Barksley who doubles as a flamethrower. (There's a running joke in there about Barksley, who is a sentient AI police officer listening to NWA and Ice-T. I'm sure most of you can guess the songs.)
Anyway, along the way, we get wrapped in in an intergalactic slave trading ring, other corporate agents with coking fetishes, and a lot about the last partner Neal had on Mars, who literally burned him.
That's about as far as I want to go with this to avoid many many spoilers.
I will say it was worth the price I paid to get a copy, and the references thrown in had me laughing quite a bit alongside some of the deeper questions about human rights and sentient AI, as well as the author's postscript about how the world may end, but capitalism will continue.
Worth the read.
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