TITLE: Simon Says (John Simon Thrillers, Book 1)
AUTHOR: Bryan Thomas Schmidt
470 pages, Boralis Books, ISBN 9781622257515 (ebook)
DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads): Master Detective John Simon is a tough, streetwise fifteen-year veteran of the Kansas City Police Department with a healthy disdain for the encroachment of modern technology into his workplace. When his partner is kidnapped after a routine stakeout by thugs with seeming ties to wealthy art dealer Benjamin Ashman, he’s determined to find the truth, but the only witness is a humanoid android named Lucas George. Reluctantly, he takes Lucas along as he begins to investigate and soon finds himself depending more and more on the very technology he so distrusts. Meanwhile, Simon’s precocious teenage daughter begins to teach Lucas how to sound more like a cop using dialogue from famous cop movies. If only he’d use them in the appropriate context. As the two men dig in deeper, they find themselves and every witness they touch faced with danger from assassins as they begin to uncover a conspiracy that may stretch from the heights of the KCPD itself to South America and beyond. Can they identify the guilty before it’s too late without getting themselves killed in the process?
MY RATING: 5 out of 5 stars
MY THOUGHTS:
If it hasn’t become clear through the reviews I’ve run recently, I am a huge fan of books and stories that blend genres. Give me spaceships powered by magic or supernatural entities appearing in well-researching historical settings and you’ve got my attention. Likewise pretty much any genre (sf, fantasy, horror) mixed with a solid mystery/crime element. Simon Says is one of those: a fast-paced crime thriller set in the near future. There’s just enough technological advancement in the world-building to place the book in our future, but not so much that the world is unrecognizable as “ours.”
Crime/thriller enthusiasts will enjoy the high-speed car chases and gun battles throughout the book. They’re made all the more intense because the author knows his setting, Kansas City, inside and out, and did lots of ride-alongs and research with local law enforcement to keep these scenes as grounded in reality as possible.
But what really makes the book work is the character interactions and character growth. Lead cop John Simon may not quite be a Luddite (he uses cars and cellphones without a problem), but he is skeptical about new tech and the applications thereof and he’s very set in his ways. He doesn’t welcome change, whether that change is in the form of a new partner or some new tech designed to make life easier. And especially not when those are combined, in the case of material-witness-turned-partner Lucas George (yes, the name is an intentional nod). In Simon and Lucas’ interactions, we get the beginning of a great buddy-copy team: experienced versus innocent, grumpy versus enthusiastic. Their relationship starts out adversarial (cop vs. witness) before turning professional and then into a friendship. It’s a fun progression to watch develop.
The book is also packed with a diverse cast of fellow officers and informants along with Simon's family and Lucas's creator who I look forward to seeing in subsequent books. The fellow officers and their support staff have distinct personalities, so they don’t feel blandly interchangeable, and I do hope they’ll get sub-plots of their own as the series continues. The informants are fun character types who I’m sure will pop up again as future stories warrant. I also know it can be hard for series based in professional settings (police precincts, hospitals, etc.) to smoothly incorporate the characters’ personal lives. Schmidt manages it here largely because Simon’s daughter becomes enmeshed in her father’s growing friendship with Lucas as well becoming a potential target of the criminals Simon is searching for. Hopefully, he can find a way to continue to include Simon’s daughter and estranged wife, as well as Lucas’ creator and her assistant, without constantly putting them in the line of danger and without their scenes feeling out of place or unneeded.
The book is high on humor and near-future pop culture references, including one of my favorite scenes involving one of my favorite STYX songs (you can read that scene HERE on my blog for free). But there are some dark moments as well, including a couple of brutally realistic scenes of grief over the death of a loved one. The bad guys are bad guys, for sure, and not everyone we meet makes it out of the book alive on either the good guys or bad guys sides of the equation.
For those who are concerned about starting a series that may not conclude, I offer these two bits of information: First, this is very much a done-in-one mystery. While there are hints at a continuing threat behind the scenes, the crimes that instigate the story are solved by the end of the book. Second, the author has already completed the second book and is hard at work on the third and expects to release them in short order in 2020. So go pick up Simon Says now and get in at the start of this fun new series.