Strange Flesh by Michael Olson
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
It's taking a lot for me to not write "not my genre, not my genre" over and over, but I think it's just that this was not that good.
The story revolves around a mysterious suicide, which then brings our hero into a corporate underworld of sorts where people are inventing virtual reality sex robots. So there's plenty of virtual reality robot sex, plenty of reality reality non-robot sex, and a murder mystery that plays second fiddle to all the virtual sex being had and discussed in the book.
It's really a total bait-and-switch. What could have been a fun cyberpunk murder mystery devolved very quickly into less-than-compelling romp through faux-online communities and fetish sexuality, none of any of the prime points quite good enough to hold my interest. And my hopes for a suitable ending, by the time I was too far in to give up, were dashed by an incredibly drawn out final arc, which matched extremely well with how long it took to get to the meat of the story to begin with.
I may be judging this more harshly than I should, since mainstream murder mysteries have never been anything that piqued my interest, but this is unfortunately fatally flawed from the first page to the last, and I don't know how I could recommend it to anyone in good faith.
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