Review: Ghosts of Tomorrow by Michael R. Fletcher

Blurb:

The children are the future. And someone is turning them into highly trained killing machines.

Straight out of school, Griffin, a junior Investigations agent for the North American Trade Union, is put on the case: Find and close the illegal crèches. No one expects him to succeed, Griffin least of all.

Installed in a combat chassis Abdul, a depressed seventeen year old killed during the Secession Wars in Old Montreal, is assigned as Griffin's Heavy Weapons support.

Nadia, a state-sanctioned investigative reporter working the stolen children story, pushes Griffin ever deeper into the nightmare of the black market brain trade.

Deep in the La Carpio slums of Costa Rica, the scanned mind of an autistic girl runs the South American Mafia's business interests. But she wants more. She wants freedom. And she has come to see humanity as a threat. She has an answer: Archaeidae. At fourteen, he is the deadliest assassin alive.

Two children against the world. The world is going to need some help.

Review:

What a trip this book was. Picked it up when it went out for free one day in February, and read it a few weeks ago and was not expecting the amount of absolute “WTF” moments throughout the book. 

Don’t get me wrong here, I loved reading through it, and will probably read it again once I fully get my head around what the hell happened in the book, but, as a general warning before you read the rest of the review, do not read this book if you have a deep dislike of Grimdarks.

With that dubious warning out of the way… I would like you, the reader, to stare at the cover art and while you do that… I’ll try to explain why that cover does the book completely right and completely wrong. 

On it is a four-armed robot, holding two swords and two revolvers. That is one of the main characters of the book, an assassin bot doing odd jobs for the cartel (we will get back to this). It looks like he’s in the middle of a fight (we will get back to this). That is great, we have one of the main characters. We however don’t have the other three main characters that also make up a portion of this book. That helps us know what we are getting into. 

What it doesn’t do, and this is why the cover might entice some readers to pick this book up before they put the book down on page 20 because they weren’t expecting that amount of violence and absolute horror-show of a world. The blurb below helps shed some light on what to expect within this book.

That robot with the katanas and guns on the cover? Well, he’s barely a teenager with a body  count nearing or even surpassing triple digits. The scanned mind of an autistic girl? Someone in the Mafia had her genetically engineered to get that specific outcome. And what this blurb fills in for us, is that this book will get dark.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it would be remiss of me not to mention that.

Onto what I enjoyed about the book:

The characters. Griffin and Nadia work amazing together in terms of solving the whole creche thing. Also loved Griffin's character development from “excited to be on the job” to “I JUST WANT THIS TO END SO I CAN TAKE A DAMN BREAK”. Nadia did her job well as a character bringing momentum to what Griffin needs to do and it is nice seeing their friendship grow and develop. Abdul… I can definitely see myself as him as I read through this book. He’s having his own existential crisis as he’s travelling with Griffin (who is also having one) and Nadia. Really liked how he went through all five stages of grief before deciding that that wasn’t worth it and proceeded to try his best to help his two new friends. I also liked how Griffin, despite going through a bit of trauma when he meets Abdul, still treats him as a living being. That shows a contrast to how most other people treat combat chassises. And the girl in Costa Rica. She is practically a human machine who wants to be alone without any input except data. Because the people who created her in a lab wanted her to be that way, they uploaded her to a computer and told her to compute things. From there she becomes SkyNet.

Archaeidae. What can/should I say about him without spoiling most of the book? He likes death, Samurais, and Cowboys, and he’s quite literally vibing to what he likes throughout the entire book. 

What I found particularly funny in terms of the SkyNet girl and Archaeidae is their whole relationship with each other. Not going to go into too many details, but SkyNet girl decides to deceive Archaeidae to go after his old bosses. Can’t say more than that in fear of spoiling the book.

Now to the plot. The plot of this book is, to put it mildly, a deranged train driver purposefully jumping off the tracks to cause as much property damage as possible. If I had to put it into an extreme, I’d describe the plot as “Handing a 12 year old a nuke” or “Human Replicas decide that humanity is overrated”. It starts relatively normal (heavy quotation marks around normal) with Archaeidae doing Archaeidae things and Griffin doing his job. Then, they meet somewhere around the halfway point and Griffin gets a strong urge to rip Archaeidae apart after he does something. Meanwhile, the SkyNet girl is amassing clones to do various sub tasks. And the ending of the book is… well, won’t say much besides absolute mayhem.

Really liked the pacing of the plot as well, and didn't go too fast or too slow.

Finally, to the writing. The writing was done well enough, didn’t feel awkward or stilted and fulfilled its purpose of bringing the story across.

What didn’t I like about the book?

Not much, to be completely transparent with you, the reader of this review. If I had to pinpoint something though, I’d have to say the child soldiers. They gave me a rather uncomfortable feeling.

If you’ve gotten to this point of the review, thanks for reading this rambling text of someone who enjoyed the book. Now, perhaps this book (or the genre of Grimdark) isn’t to your liking, but don’t fret. We here have other books that we have reviewed that might be more to your liking. Should you be looking for a fantasy book, check out Anie M's review of “Spark of the Divine”, written by Louise Holland. Or should you be looking for a science fiction book that is less of a Grimdark, check out Joshua Walker's review of “Lost Souls”, written by Ryan Skeffington. As always, I hope we here have helped you along on finding your next read.

To everyone who has read until here, have a good morning, good afternoon or good night, depending on when you are reading this.