Fifty years in the future, the world (as described by author J.O. Quantaman) is a somewhat different place. Technology may be better, but crime is still everywhere. Ensuring fair play is an organization known as Dog Breakfast: a team of trained professionals ranging from blackbelts to hackers and everything in between. Their skills at subterfuge, intel, and combat mean they’re prepared for everything—including going down the rabbit hole of a sex-trafficking ring to find a rapist and murderer.
Leading the charge are Nyssa and Shep, joined by Griz, Jen, and their AI assistants (the Kiras). With a stop off at a fighting ring to fund their operation, the four proceed to tail the perp to Ecuador, where their fighting mettle will be put to the test. They’re not the only people working hard, though. Far away in the “soupcans,” a schooling and training ground for young people, Raven is recovering from a shipwreck. As a new foot is regrown, she trains both physically and mentally to one day join the outside world and potentially shape up enough to join the ranks of Dog Breakfast.
AFTERLIFE is a massive book with a lot of moving parts. There are three main streams of information at play. First is the main part: Dog Breakfast on their case, with a detour in Tijuana for “funding.” The secondary plot, Raven’s growth in the soupcans, intersects here and there. And finally, crossing over both of these, is worldbuilding. Here is where a strong story begins to struggle under its own weight.
While the adventure is intriguing, and Raven’s storyline serves as an aspirational counterpoint to the rough-and-tumble world of Dog Breakfast, the sheer quantity of its settings can drag things down. While the clickable names and slang throughout the e-book can be helpful, the reader loses the opportunity for diegetic storytelling—which is much better for retention and makes the world feel more alive. Similarly, large swathes of text are devoted to papers, lessons, and diagrams. While this does help to build what the world of Quantaman’s future is like, it also interrupts intriguing action and makes it easy to lose one’s place.
All that said, the action itself does work. The internal monologues are presented as offset poetry, which makes some of the less natural text (“My clammy T-shirt which hugs breasts like lava flows”) somewhat more viable. The book really shines when it allows the worldbuilding—especially the interaction and use of psigns, the various senses and values that allow disparate cultures to function with each other—to live and breathe in the story. The book alternately “shows” and “tells.” When it shows, it shines; but when it tells, it slows.
AFTERLIFE presents the reader with an intriguing and well-developed world. The book itself is extremely dense with information, but if the reader can get through that, then the moments of action and espionage are gems.
J.O. Quantaman’s AFTERLIFE: Cool Assassins 3 is an ambitious book that sets out to do many things, and it does enough of those things well to make it worth the read.
~Kara Dennison for IndieReader