25 January 2015

Review: Geek Mafia: Black Hat Blues


Geek Mafia: Black Hat Blues
Geek Mafia: Black Hat Blues by Rick Dakan

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



Maybe closer to a 2.5?

I had very warm feelings about this series, liking the first book a lot in particular. Looking back at my review of the second book, I apparently bleached out my memory of it because I really didn't like it, but hey, the third book is available to me so I'll give it a shot, right?

The problems with this book are legion. The first quarter feels like a Cory Doctorow knockoff, the middle half a meandering mess of a cyberpunk mystery, and, while the end does kind of redeem things a bit, the full result is a hacker novel that provides little to truly get excited over.

I feel badly about this, as I just want this to be a lot better than it ends up being. But the unfortunate truth is that the characters barely resemble who they were when they started out (and not in a "character growth" way), and this book feels less like a necessary coda and more of an add-on.

I still think the first book is pretty great. This book pretty much solidifies, however, the way the rest of the series kind of falls apart. Unfortunate, but there are certainly other books and other series that do this better.



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