A few weeks ago Handy and I were talking about ebooks and ebook readers, when he happened to mention a book he had hanging around, with the strange/silly name of Geek Mafia. Being as I am a geek (not that you’d notice by reading this site :) and that my favorite book of all times is Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, I had to give it a try :) This book is outside of the regular SF/F stuff I write about here, it’s more along the lines of an adventure story, combined with cops&robbers, but it’s still a hell of a fun book, and every geek should read it :)
I had never read any of Rick Dakan’s stuff before, so I didn’t really know what to expect. He’s actually an interesting author, with pretty good character development, interesting ideas, easy-to-read style and interesting plot twisting abilities…I’m gonna have to go look for more of his stuff :)
The book is an interesting mixture between geek fantasies about making it big with a startup and Hustle (one of my favorite TV shows of all times :) There is, of course, the required hot babe, but, unlike most adventure fiction, there really isn’t a bad guy in sight…or, better said, all characters are bad guys, including the protagonist…it’s all just a matter of degrees.
It all starts when we meet our protagonist, Paul Reynolds, sitting in a bar drawing and sketching, trying to exorcise his anger. He’s one of the founding partners of Fear and Loading Games, a game design startup based on the storyline of his indie comic book, as well as on his character designs. Why would he be so angry, you ask? Well…his partners just decided to kick his ass out of the company because they see him as a slacker. Computer geeks are obsessive in the way they face work, 90hr weeks being almost vacations, all-nighters being regular things and so on, but…artistic geeks are a whole different thing, or at least Paul is.
Then we get to meet the story’s hot babe, with her “hair cut short and spiky, was died a magenta so bright it nearly glowed”….every geek’s dreamgirl, right? :) Chloe draws him into conversation, getting him to tell her why he’s fuming, and then offers to help him get back at his partners so he gets what he deserves from them, instead of just the two months of severance pay that they will offer him after kicking him out on the street. She comes up with an elaborate scheme to get a lot of money out of them, with the help of some of her friends, and Paul decides that he’s game.
After that fortuitous bar meeting, we get to follow the adventures of Paul and Chloe as he gets even with his former partners…at least we follow that story for the first few chapters…after that, the story gets really crazy…and interesting enough that I had a hard time letting go of the book before finishing it :)
I don’t like to spoil books, as you’ve probably figured out from reading other reviews here, but in this particular case that practice makes it so the review will have to be a lot smaller than usual, because…anything said about this book would be a plot spoiler…all I can say is that it’s a very fun story, with all the elements necessary for a book to be worth recommending and reading more than once. And for 5 bucks, it’s a steal, so…go buy it, you won’t regret it :)
Tags: adventure, fiction, geek mafia, hustle, Reviews, rick dakan
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