Some of Mr. Scott’s books have been pretty strange and a little hard to understand sometimes. But, not this one. This is a very good piece of work. It stays interesting all the way through with some unique twists that I really didn’t think about until they were reveled. The character development was also pretty great and he even explained the use of robots as human replacements pretty good.
Cake Korbin is a Bounty Hunter and has been one for quite some time. We do find out that in his past, he was a Special Ops soldier, a Paladin, for the Coalition. That didn’t work out so well when he was accused of trying to start a war between the Coalition and the Alliance. He was actually following orders and they didn’t work out so well. The mission failed and a scrape-goat was needed. Korbin was subsequently tried and convicted and sent to ten years in ARCmax prison. He got out and had to have some kind of job and bounty hunting seemed to fit his skill set. You’ll get all this back ground information as the book goes and it’s given at appropriate times. It really does do a job of building up Cade Korbin as someone other than a deadly killer. He has a code of honor which isn’t followed by most other bounty hunters.
What is going to cause Cade his current problem is that the contract he has now is for the wrong guy and an innocent man is about to get killed for no good reason. The guy is an honest cop caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Korbin’s not doing the torture , he’s an observer and with all the technical stuff they’re using to probe this guys brain, it’s clear to Korbin that the cop doesn’t know what they are trying to get out of him. So, and this is where things start taking off, Korbin steps in and stops the torture and takes the cop out of the area. He says he’s had enough and knows that this cop is innocent so he’s going to get him off Terra Nova and send him to Earth where he’ll be safe. Then the cop says his wife and child are being held so there’s that to complicate the problem.
Korbin is used to solving complicated problems because most of the time he’s creating them. Like when he is trying to get some information and finds a young lady in a very disreputable place doing a very disreputable job. She obviously doesn’t want to be doing what she’s doing and her boss is bent on making her life even worse. So when Korbin sees some thug dragging the young lady out of the bar to who knows where, he has to step in because, you know, he has this code of honor. He winds up rescuing the young lady and in the process meets up with Aurora Velez. Velez is in the same business as Korbin, but she’s just a rookie. She has a large, seven million credit contract that she needs help in completing and asks Korbin for help. He decides to help once he’s almost killed and out of credits. He needs the money and he’s curious about Aurora Velez.
Something is happening all the way through the book. There is a lot of advanced technology in this book. People can die and then come back as “bots” or robots that almost have all the physical features of their former biological bodies only they are better. So, some people who had died have come back as bots and are usually out for revenge if their death was expected or caused by their on carelessness! Cade Korbin is 100% biological and he’s nearing fifty years old. That’s kind of surprising that he’s lasted as long as he has considering the job he has, but he’s good at what he does.
I like this character and I like how he does things so I think this will be a series I will continue to read. Apparently there are already three more books in this series available on Amazon. I just put the second book, “Alien Artifacts” on my reading list. I’ll probably be reading all four before I’m done!