Pun Salad

Two I had already read; they were, I thought, reasonably decent.

So I started in on the ones I hadn't read. Results on the next six: not bad; mediocre; not my cup of tea; meh; hated it; pretty good.

That's not a bad batting average, but for a "Top 10 Greatest" list, it's surprisingly awful.

There's something about a project of this sort that compels me to finish it, so up comes The Disappeared by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. (io9 actually recommends the whole series, and this is the chronological first in the series.) Another loser, I'm afraid. But at least the Kindle version was relatively inexpensive.

It is set mostly on the Moon, in a time when interactions between humans and intelligent species are common enough to set up legal rules for conflict resolution. And the rules make Draco look like an ACLU card-carrier: if you run afoul of an alien legal system, they get to do pretty much whatever they want to you and your family. Tough darts, kid.

Unsurprisingly, there is a thriving market in "disappearance" services, which promise to extract you from your current life, and set you up tracelessly as someone else, somewhere else, all in order to escape alien legal punishment.

The story here involves two lunar cops dealing with some thorny cases where disappearance has been unsuccessful: one race has kidnapped a couple kids to atone for the sins of the parents; another has slaughtered the passengers of a ship, who thought they were being taken to safety; a third is looking to track down a lady lawyer they hold responsible for the subsequent crimes of a client she defended. It takes a Real Long Time for the cops to figure things out: the disappearance service common to all three cases has decided to make a little more money by betraying their clients to the aliens.

Ms. Rusch is an amazingly prolific professional writer, and won some awards, so you might have better luck with her than I did. Her prose was (mostly) professional, but lacked sparkle and failed to grab my interest. As the book wore on, I got the feeling she was padding things to meet some contractually-obligated word count. One chapter opens with a character waking up to find his right foot asleep. But—ah—a few sentences later, we discover "Only one side had fallen asleep. The other side was just fine."

Good to know. The few fractions of a second I spent parsing that are now gone, never to return.

There are also signs of shoddy editing. One guy says "I was never really comfortable with the way we were flaunting the law." Another reflects that he'd heard some bit of advice "from every single officer he'd spoken too." If my unprofessional eye can catch such boners, there are almost certainly others. Fair or not, I hear the publisher saying: Proofreading? Nah! Just get it out the door so the boobs can buy it.