‘Breakaway’ – Joel Shepherd (Pyr Books)

I woke up at four o’clock this morning and just knew that there was no way I was going to be able to get back to sleep. Don’t you just hate it when that happens? This morning wasn’t so bad though as I was able to use the time to get back into Joel Shepherd’s ‘Breakaway’, I’d been reading it on the train yesterday and now I had a good excuse to finish the book off. It’s not as good as ‘Crossover’ but is still great stuff and well worth a look if you’re into sci-fi and cyberpunk…
It’s only been a matter of days since the climatic events of ‘Crossover’ and Cassandra Kresnov (synthetic human and deadliest person on Callay) is still struggling against the prejudices and suspicion that she is held under by everyone else. At the same time, the political parties of Callay move towards a critical vote that will determine the planet’s future relationship with the Federation. There is a lot to be gained from this vote and Cassandra is about to find herself at the centre of every plot and connivance…
‘Breakaway’ is the middle book in a trilogy and, unfortunately, this shows in that the book tends to come across as only setting up events for the final instalment. A fairly major plot strand isn’t resolved and, seeing as there’s meant to be a two year gap in the story (from what I’ve read), it will be interesting to see how this is tackled in ‘Killswitch’. Cassandra’s ‘introspective episodes’ (where she dwells on the nature of being ‘human’) are again well detailed, at least as well as in ‘Crossover’. The scene where she is given a baby to hold really caught me out as Shepherd takes things in a different direction and provides more food for thought. This theme makes for some very interesting reading but (unlike the first book) Cassandra fails to reach any conclusions. This could just be ‘build up’ for Book Three but the sense of ‘unfinished business’ really rankled. Cassandra is pretty much a pawn of others throughout the book and has to piece together a lot of things for herself. Now, I know that Cassandra is hyper-intelligent but there are a lot of occasions where “all of a sudden, everything became clear”; it doesn’t feel as if she is able to work things out for herself, things just occur to her or she is able to use some computer trickery to get the information that she needs. It would have been good if we could have seen more evidence of reasoning and intuition as this would have added more weight to Cassandra’s ‘humanity’…
This may all seem that I had nothing but issues with ‘Breakaway’ but the fact is that everything that made ‘Crossover’ such a good read can be found here as well. There’s enough action and intrigue here to fill three or four lesser books and, despite my reservations, I was completely hooked by the direction that the story led me in. Characterisation was spot on as well; Cassandra and Rice were two characters that I completely empathised with and I even found myself keeping an eye out for other ‘lesser’ characters to see how they were getting on.
‘Breakaway’ feels like a bit of a disappointment, compared to ‘Crossover’, but still manages to do an admirable job and I think it would be better judged once I have finished reading ‘Killswitch’ and the series is complete. I’m sure that exciting times lie ahead for Cassandra Kresnov and I intend to be there to see how it all ends.

Seven and Three Quarters out of Ten