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A review by bellatora
Gun Machine by Warren Ellis
5.0
I totally thought this would be a sci fi thriller with a time-travelling serial killer, like [b:The Shining Girls|16131077|The Shining Girls|Lauren Beukes|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1352227705s/16131077.jpg|21956898]. Not sci fi at all. The serial killer just liked using guns from a lot of different periods (he was kind of a poetic killer, using a gun that somehow connected to the victim, like using a police gun on a police officer or a Korean-made gun on a Korean-born man or a gun from the first murder in upstate New York on a victim from upstate New York) and he was schizophrenic so he just thought he was travelling through pre-colonial New York instead of actually being able to travel between times/dimensions or whatever. And his giant murder-gun sacrifice design used as kind of Ghost Dance to end the white rule of New York was ALSO just part of his schizophrenia and there weren’t really old gods that existed. So all the potentially speculative elements were really just a result of the murderer's mental illness.
I’m not disappointed that it wasn't the sci fi book I'd thought it was. It was a good mystery/thriller, with the right amount of blood/gore, stoic cop and interesting story telling/character development.
The book opens by establishing that Detective John Tallow and his partner are good friends and good partners and then proceeds to kill off Tallow’s partner with a shot by a random nobody during a response to a call about a guy going crazy in an apartment complex. This serves to establish Tallow to be a Broken Bird who is in pain because his partner is dead. It also frees him to do some solo-investigating, and more importantly leads the police to the apartment of the serial killer (they got into the apartment because one of the stray bullets from the shootout went through the apartment’s door and they had to check that the bullet hadn’t killed anyone). That act breaks open a decades-old conspiracy with the serial killer, who is working for a mysterious cabal AND who uses the cabal's assassinations for his own schizophrenic reasons.
Good solid read and good way to pass the time.
I’m not disappointed that it wasn't the sci fi book I'd thought it was. It was a good mystery/thriller, with the right amount of blood/gore, stoic cop and interesting story telling/character development.
The book opens by establishing that Detective John Tallow and his partner are good friends and good partners and then proceeds to kill off Tallow’s partner with a shot by a random nobody during a response to a call about a guy going crazy in an apartment complex. This serves to establish Tallow to be a Broken Bird who is in pain because his partner is dead. It also frees him to do some solo-investigating, and more importantly leads the police to the apartment of the serial killer (they got into the apartment because one of the stray bullets from the shootout went through the apartment’s door and they had to check that the bullet hadn’t killed anyone). That act breaks open a decades-old conspiracy with the serial killer, who is working for a mysterious cabal AND who uses the cabal's assassinations for his own schizophrenic reasons.
Good solid read and good way to pass the time.