Soledad O’Dwyer is a badass cop who leads a team of badass cops in hunting down super-powered mutants in a near-future Los Angeles. Unfortunately, somebody or something has been beating O’Dwyer to the punch, killing off mutants across the city in mystifying ways, which leads O’Dwyer away from the bullets-and-bruises law enforcement to which she’s accustomed in order to unravel a posssible conspiracy within the department itself.
WHAT FIRE CANNOT BURN, the sequel to Ridley’s earlier THOSE WHO WALK IN DARKNESS, opens with a bang, but it, much like the book’s cover (which features sexy, scantily clad ladies who happen to be armed to the teeth), is only a red herring for the novel within.
WHAT FIRE is, for all intents and purposes, a series of character studies set inside a twisted police procedural. O’Dwyer is more comfortable
taking on flame-controlling maniacs than she is with her personal relationships, and she bristles at the hero worship the younger officers (and one officer in particular, an up-and-coming badass named Eddi Aoki) try to hide. Her investigation leads to the DMI, an investigative arm of the police staffed by disfigured and disturbed former mutant fighters now saddled with desk jobs and other nonconfrontational investigations, and things go sideways from there.
Ridley takes a lot of chances with this book. While there are flashes of the typical high-stakes action and a guns-blazing finale, the author dares to take the road less traveled with this kind of book and go for a fully realized world that exchanges cardboard characters and Bruckheimer-esque dialogue (well, there’s some of the latter) for thinking, feeling characters who live in a world where violence has consequences, and not just for the bad guys. Ridley doesn’t quite succeed in everything he attempts (O’Dwyer’s family gets far too little ink, and the relationship between Aoki and O’Dwyer doesn’t fully support the back third of the book), but it’s an admirable effort. Vignettes from the mutants’ viewpoint showcase Ridley’s sparkling creativity and cement this as a great paperback to pick up in the typically slow winter season. –Ryun Patterson
Related posts:
