Point and Shoot -- Duane Swierczynski

A little over eight years ago (!) I reviewed Duane Swierczynski's Secret Dead Men.  I could tell immediately that Swierczynski had something going for him -- the ability to write some really weird stuff and make it work.  He's proved that again and again since, and nowhere more than in his trilogy about Charlie Hardie, who, as Swierczynski puts it goes "through about six lifetimes of physical abuse."  I'd put it at something like more than twenty lifetimes, myself, but as we learn in Point and Shoot, there's a reason Charlie is so hard to kill.

You may remember from Fun & Games and Hell & Gone that Charlie's on the run from the Accident People, who are part of the Cabal, which is the group that really runs this country.  They can kill and maim and do pretty much whatever they want to do, and after Charlie escapes from the escape-proof prison in Hell & Gone, they put him in a satellite in low-earth orbit, where he's supposed to spend a year, though they'll probably just try to kill him again when he gets out.  If he gets out.

And he's not there for the reason he's been told, as he learns when his perfect double arrives.  No one is supposee to be able to get there, much less get inside, but it happens.  Then the satellite crashes, and then the chase is on, with one damned thing after another, and plenty of crosses and double crosses and triple crosses thrown in.  

It's another wild ride from Swierczynski, and it's also very funny, as if you didn't know that already.  We can all sit back now and wait to see what he'll do next.