Chapter By Chapter> TekWar chapter 31

Chapter By Chapter features me reading one chapter of the selected book at a time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as read-along book club.

It’s kind of interesting that I’m taking a break from the comic organizing, where I’m trying to reorganize the Star Trek comics today (I’ll be making daily reports over at The Clutter Reports, link in the blogroll at the bottom of the page) to review a William Shatner novel, though some claim Ron Goulart ghostwrote the whole thing–though Shatner does acknowledge Goulart “showed him the way”. I didn’t want to stop this because we’re almost done and I’m anxious to finish this and start the next book. Not that this has been a slog or anything, though the worldbuilding has felt like padding at times which is not how you worldbuild your story. However, said padding has made this book longer than it needed to be. Maybe they needed to reach a goal for the original hardcover or something.

Last time our hero met with his contact and met with his other ex. I’m kind of worried they’re going to try to shove every character into this first book, essentially committing a similar mistake to Tom Clancy’s Op-Center in being more interested in showing characters for the series than telling the story, or alternately shoving them in because they’re part of the worldbuilding and they want to show off everything they came up with in case there isn’t a second book. Jake is now off to meet one or two more characters who have been mentioned a lot thus far. That or he’s just going to the casino for the show. Let’s see which.

Honestly, if I wasn’t in the middle of this next phase of my comic organizing “mega-project”, as I call it over at The Clutter Reports I’d probably read a second chapter. This is normal length but somehow still seems to go by pretty fast. The first segment is just Jake and Bethdroid talking about his meeting with Kate. They talk about it a bit more as they head to meet their bookstore contact. It’s actually a good thing to have here. Jake is finally dealing with the fact that he and Kate are over and kicking himself for not seeing the clues that Kate was cheating on him while Kate was sure he had to know because he’s a detective. He was so in love that he didn’t see what was going on. Now with everything that’s happened Jake is finally over that and ready to move on. It’s a sort of completion for Jake’s character arc, coming to terms with what’s happened to him, though his story arc continues since he has to confront his potential framers. Even if Kate is right about Sands not behind this it does seem like he and Hokori are pals.

We also play a bit with Bethdroid’s missing memory between the disappearance and her activation. She finds a few things strange herself, possibly Jake’s influence rubbing off, and wonders if the real Beth was suspecting something was up with her father. We know the crash was faked but how much of it was he in on? It’s a question that’s been in the shadows but now may be a plot point and motivation source. Speaking of which for some reason we’re told Bethdroid also was sitting in the shadows of the hotel room, which only matters if you’re watching it as a show or movie but there’s no reason for that either. Bethdroid is fine until she explodes.

Or rather, fake Jake’s son explodes. She realizes it before Jake does, again letting his emotions cloud his detective judgement, like with Kate. It’s actually another kamikaze android and Bethdroid lets herself get blown up, saving Jake’s life. We can tell she’s come to care about him, and it’s a sad way to see her go out, but it’s a heroic death and I’m guessing next chapter we’ll see the morning period. Hopefully not too long because we’ve only three chapters left now. I do wonder if that was just intuition or if she had some other way of knowing. She threw them both out of the casino window to keep anyone else from getting hurt that wasn’t the target, like the one that almost took Gomez. I’ll miss her but as memory serves we haven’t see the last of her…physically anyway.

Well, it’s back to the comics for me, but next time we’ll see how Jake responds to his robo-love interest being blown up with the face of his son.