Billie Thompson reviewed The electric church by Jeff Somers
Review of 'The electric church' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
TL;DR Thoroughly enjoyable detective novel-esque romp.
Jeff Somers' Electric Church is set in a post-nation state era. The world is ruled by one unified government referred to as "The System". This System is portrayed as corrupt, ruthless and uncaring.
This system also offers wide ranging protection for religions. A large and rapidly growing religion in this world is The Electric Church. The Electric Church is a religion where people are converted to "Monks", cyborgs with only a human brain, by removing the brain of the dead.
The Church recruits people against there will, by shooting them, but this is hidden from the general public and government. The Church targets the "criminal" class, following them into deserted areas, as they have little recourse to take with the government.
In this atmosphere our (anti-)hero Avery Cates, a gun for hire, is hired by the chief of internal affairs of the police. He …
TL;DR Thoroughly enjoyable detective novel-esque romp.
Jeff Somers' Electric Church is set in a post-nation state era. The world is ruled by one unified government referred to as "The System". This System is portrayed as corrupt, ruthless and uncaring.
This system also offers wide ranging protection for religions. A large and rapidly growing religion in this world is The Electric Church. The Electric Church is a religion where people are converted to "Monks", cyborgs with only a human brain, by removing the brain of the dead.
The Church recruits people against there will, by shooting them, but this is hidden from the general public and government. The Church targets the "criminal" class, following them into deserted areas, as they have little recourse to take with the government.
In this atmosphere our (anti-)hero Avery Cates, a gun for hire, is hired by the chief of internal affairs of the police. He is hired to assassinate the head of the Electric Church. After having seen one of his friends shot by the Church after a night of drinking.
To do this Cates builds a team. He does this by contacting the local criminal directory, which takes the form of a man called Pickering in an illegal bar. He hires 2 (hover) car thieves, a "tech guy", and one of his friends who is a psychic. Later they are joined by someone claiming to be a legendary gun man who is later revealed to be someone who worked with the gun man.
While Avery is supposed to be up against the Church, they hardly seem to be used to their full potential. They have robotic followers armed to the teeth however they never attack him or his team on mass, which they could have quite easily done. While this is a little weird, you could sweep this under the carpet by saying that they were trying to keep a low profile.
At many points of the story "The System" is used to force a number of different events to occur. Quite often the the police officers of the system seem to appear for no other reason other than to make the story exciting. This while seeming a little predictable (Oh Avery has gone somewhere else he's going to get randomly attacked soon), it's not too bad, and mostly pushes up the pace.
The characters are al-right, and perform the sort of weird action film based magic ability to always find guns, or whatever weird tech or drugs they need without any real effort. This can seem a little Jaring in some books, but this is just a fast paced romp, so I didn't really mind.
Overall I enjoyed this book in the same way you enjoy an action film or Rom/Com: fun but don't think about it too much.
