Book Review: ARvekt by Craig Lea Gordon
We follow Tannis, a black ops trained cyborg assassin who is tasked with hunting down brain hackers and stealing their information and processing powers. The reader is dropped right into one of these missions, full of realities within realities, plenty of technologically advanced weaponry and a bloody battle. From the very beginning we see there is more than meets the eye with these brain hacks and Tannis needs to find out why.
Following the mission Tannis falls victim to an attack of a different kind, her own mind seems to be playing tricks on her and she isn’t so sure of her own sanity after she was essentially wiped clean and reset following a past trauma questioning if those events were to happen to her again.
On top of all this, the seemingly innocent AI who governs the entire human population (and can access them all to send code or who knows what else at its whim) may not be the protector they all know and trust. Tannis starts seeing things that aren’t there (or are they). Suddenly living in two realities it is a race against time to find out what is real and what isn’t.
This book was vivid! The imagery depicted both the worldbuilding scenes and the battle scenes really stood out to me as something special. If you love that cyberpunk, feel to bleed out of the page you are going to find it here. These were probably my favourite scenes in the book, where realities disintegrated as a moment’s notice only to throw the reader somewhere else in the next sentence. It kept the book fast paced and entertaining (even if it did take a little brain work). I also really liked the premise of the story and some of those bigger conversations it invites the reader to have with themselves. Would having a giant AI making nearly every whim accessible be such a good thing, why or why not?
A couple of downsides to Arvekt were that I didn’t find the characters overly gripping. Some of them felt like they were just there, and there were a few to keep up with for a book just over 300 pages. I didn’t feel particularly invested in any of them save our main protagonist (and even then, it was only at certain points during my read). I also had a few issues with the dialogue where it felt a little rushed and like too much information was being put into these snippets of conversation for the reader to try and place together.
I found the read to be extremely fast paced and kept me entertained the entire way through. It was very easy to keep turning the pages to find out what was going to happen next. If you like a lot of technology filled action and don’t mind sacrificing your enjoyment of character development for entertainment, this is one to check out.
Arvekt was a wildly entertaining cyberpunk technothriller that was action packed as soon as you opened the book.
