Review::Grey Enigmas by Gareth Lewis

Original Review:April 2014
Grey Enigmas by Gareth Lewis

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Grey Enigmas by Gareth Lewis

This is a cute little novella with rather unique idea in a strange cyberpunk like novel that (like many novels I've recently read) seems to take a page from these game MMORPG's with the mind-scape and the Actors. There's one of the MMORPG's I'm thinking of that specifically calls them Actors instead of Avatars.

I think this might be an extension of a longer work called the Grey Engines. In this story we have the futuristic society that is full of zombie like workers who allow their actors to take over the daily grind while they live in some idealistic world that exist in some sort of connected mind-scape.

Of course this story revolves around the people who spend less time in the mind-scape and more time in the real world. In the real world there is less crime and more control but occasionally things happen and when they can't solve the crime they look to people like Alex whom they have sentenced to live in a special section of mind-scape to met out their time for their crime.

Everyone has two personalities their own and their Actor-the personality who keeps an eye on them and when they do something wrong the actor will turn them in and this is what happened to Alex. But Alex is an investigator, one of the best, and they need him to solve a murder before more happen. Someone had committed a murder and their actor has not turned them in which means something is seriously wrong with the system.

So Alex is brought out of storage to solve the crime while being hamstrung in so many ways that he can hardly do the job. But that's not all: because there is something else going on that's going to greatly affect Alex because the members of the sheriff brain trust that pulled his body out of cold storage are not telling him all the truth.

Alex has no regard for their laws or rules, so he's going to get to the bottom of things if it kills him.

This is a great read for fans of SFF (a bit on the soft-side) There were some few moments when the style of writing confused me enough I had to step back a page to see where we were but those were minor distractions and the over all pace of the story was handled quite well.

J.L. Dobias



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