Woken Furies

”We are all chasing ghosts, Kovacs-san. Living as long as we do now, how could we not be.”

Man…. I wanted so bad for this series to be more than it ended up being. I found the first book amazing, the second book still good (but way different), and had hopes that it’d find its stride again in the third book to bring it all home again. It does not. In fact, it’s a super mediocre ending to a series that started out so great.

Kovacs gets spit out again, this time back home on Harlan’s World, resleeved and living out a personal grudge against—well, that’s the question for half of the book, isn’t it? As the reader, we’re not clued in on what Kovacs is up to personally until after things have already kicked off. Sure we’re along on his cyberpunk adventure as he hunts people down, but we don’t know why he’s hunting them down. Somewhere along the way, he gets wrapped up in Quellist politics, and we get entire segments of the book devoted to Harlan’s World political science and we’re treated to lengthy political debates amongst two groups of people that will never see eye to eye.

Also, that ending. Extensive ending spoilers here: I was all geared up for a Kovacs v. Kovacs showdown, but even that conclusion was taken away from me by a trigger-happy Jad. Talk about anticlimactic.

The cast of characters is extensive, way more than needed to exist for this book’s story to be told. The story itself felt really disjointed after Kovacs gets in good with the Quellists, and I hope you like copious amounts of sex, because there’s copious amounts of sex. There’s bits and pieces in here of what I liked so much from the other books, but you have to dig for them amongst the Quellisms and sexytimes.

I don’t know, disappointing ending to something that started out so great. Not a terrible book if you know what you’re getting into and like that sort of thing, but it definitely was a bad note to end the series on.