Z/Web

Author: Philip Kerr

Surprisingly, a Kerr SF book that works! The plot’s cool: it is 2069 and most of the earth’s population is infected with a deadly blood virus called P2 that’s an automatic death sentence. Many live for years, but when the disease is triggered, you die within three months. The cure is simple: a complete blood transfusion. However, the new blood but not be contaminated with the virus, of course. And thus clean blood has become the most precious commodity on the planet. The eleven pints of blood in a typical person has a value of over 7 million dollars. Frozen blood is stored in high-tech blood banks which are protected by elaborate security systems. The biggest blood bank is on the moon, and the designer of the security system, Dallas, has decided to rob it. He puts together a team of experts and sets out to do the impossible. Great concept, and well written, with a caveat or two. First, the actual robbery, though promised early on, doesn’t take place until near the end of the book, and it’s a little anti-climactic. Second, the narrator of the book is an important character, revealed at the end, which is a great twist. Unfortunately, he’s a little inane. Almost every page of the novel has footnotes, which go into mind-numbingly minute detail about science and medicine. The narrator’s interesting because he brings philosophical questions and observations to the events, but unfortunately he contradicts himself, in some places “proving” there is no God, in others proving that God must exist, and in others questioning God’s existence as though he doesn’t know. I’m not sure what Kerr’s intent was in doing that: I don’t doubt it was intentional, but whatever the reason it isn’t clear and it doesn’t work. It just makes me the think the narrator’s a little unbalanced (maybe that was the point). The book’s pacing could also use a work — it drags on and on, mostly because we’re told about the robbery early but since it doesn’t happen until late in the novel, all the set-up stuff (which is important) seems to be a waste of our time. The book’s bad guy (conflict) is also weak, almost a red herring with the ease in which he’s dispatched when the time is right. That takes away some of the suspense. Overall, though, this is very good. It’s definitely Kerr’s best technology-related book, and the philosophical musing by the narrator are certainly thought-provoking (though many of the conclusions are inaccurate and incomplete, though as you’ll see, that could be intentional).