A Fire in the Sun by George Alec Effinger
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The second novel in the Budayeen Trilogy and not too dissimilar from the first. It follows the same main character who is now working as a crime lord's plant in a police department. So he has all the disadvantages of both being a cop and a mafioso, which is to say, nobody likes him very much for most of the story.
The novel definitely does a few things right; it begins to critique the main character's selfishness and misogyny, and begins to make him pay a price for it. For example, it explores the character's difficult relationship with his mother and its connection to his relationship with women, and those around him are horrified by his treatment of his mother. And there are several other moments where the main character is forced to confront himself and examine his conscience, that collectively tilt the book in the direction of a more critical examination of the main character's faults. I found the more skeptical tone welcome after the more ambiguous engagement in the previous book.
But even though the author managed to put some distance between himself and the main character, that still leaves us with a book following a mostly unlikeable character through a bog-standard Lethal Weapon-style police procedural plot with a few, by now familiar, cyberpunk elements grafted on. It was well-written in a workmanlike way, but lacked the allusions and sense of play that the first book had. That is to say the book almost totally failed to innovate on the formula from the first book and felt a little stale.
I enjoyed it to some extent, even so, but if the first book was a three and a half star book, this was more like two and a half stars. If you were really hooked into the plot of the first book and wanted to know what became of the characters, this is worth a read, but lacks much else to recommend it. I'm going to read the third, but I don't have high hopes.