"You have a faith as deep as mine. The only thing I wonder is why you need so badly not to believe." So, I really liked the first book in this series when I read it last year. Sci-fi! Cyberpunk! Murder mystery! Detective noir stuff! All of that hit just the right notes with me, and I really appreciated the psychological spin the author put on the whole concept of resleeving. I was excited to pick up this book! But then I discover that it's its own thing. Completely stand alone. And not even involving mysteries. Way more sci-fi, way more (unnecessary) sex. I thought the meat of the book was interesting, but I also felt like all the sex scenes in this one weren't quite necessary to advance the plot any. They just seemed like (un)interesting diversions the author wanted to go on while writing this book. Like if Morgan's editor was really Shatner, and he was whispering in Morgan's ear about sci-fi sex selling in entertainment media. Also. There was. Another thing that bothered me in this book. I. Don't exactly know how to describe it. Except that it involved lots of periods instead of proper punctuation. Like ellipses. Or. Commas. No. Instead we get. Paragraphs like these where the speaker would pause in the middle of a sentence. For effect. And then a new sentence would start up with the rest of their thought. It was. Super distracting. And kind of unnecessary. I'm not a writer. But I feel like I could write better sentence structure. Still, I gave this book 3 stars, if only because I (still) really like the premise behind this series and the sci-finess of it all. The story was entertaining enough, if a little basic when compared with the plot and twists of the first book. I was still glad to have read it, but am hoping the third book recaptures a bit of the magic of the first for me.

Morgan has a niche: stylish, sorta politically-literate hi-octane plotfests. Altered Carbon was noir; this one’s war reportage. Kovacs - his broke-down hard-boiled super-soldier - is good, able to carry off the witty sociopathy of the action hero involuntarily – tropes are brutally programmed into him. ‘Quell’, Morgan’s Marx-figure, lurks larger here. There’s a bucket of great tech ideas, but they’re never the focus; the people scrambling in the wake of their machines are still recognisably human. Great names, too (a nuked town named “Sauberville”, a mercenary broker named “Semetaire”.) His many characters are vivid; his prose brash; his themes large, dark, but not moping.