Far into the future and Koko Martstellar has given up the life of a gun for hire and taken an offer from her former comrade, Portia Delacompte to settle down on The Sixty Islands and run a brothel in the world's most debauched and dangerous pleasure complex. Everything seems to be going fine until Portia sets up Koko, which degenerates into sending a hit after her, the problem is Portia can’t remember why as she has undergone selective memory erasure. Escaping the Sixty Islands Koko flees, during her flight she meets Flynn, an ex-cop suffering from a terminal depression...

Koko Takes a Holiday (2014. 332 pages) is the first novel, written by Kieran Shea; it’s a fast paced science fiction fantasy thriller.

Whilst it is a fine first novel, it is not without its problems. Shea uses flashback chapters to fill in the history between Koko and Portia, in-between the full throttle main story, unfortunately this leaves very little room to either develop Koko as a character or provide the depth required for a reader to ultimately care what happens to her.

Stylistically Shea has taken the punk sensibilities of Tank Girl, added a sprinkling of Anthony Burgess Droog speech and wrapped them around a standard thriller of a girl on the run who against the odds finds an ally, in an unexpected place. He has added some ideas of his own including the condition which is affecting Flynn, who has been diagnosed with Depressus, a form of mood disorder which kills. Only, there is neither rhyme nor reason to the condition, although the idea of the sufferers committing mass murder by chucking themselves from a great height could have been more subversive and funny than it was. It also creates a pointless level to the book as we can already work out that it will not kill Flynn unless Shea is willing to sacrifice one of his major characters.

Shea throws everything at the wall in this novel, so there are numerous sexual reference and regular uber violence, which makes for a wickedly delicious ride. I do wish that Shea had spent more time on the world building. Often, in an effort to keep the pace going, Shea fails to wait long enough for his audience to smell the flowers, but as a follow up book is in the pipeline, hopefully we’ll get to spend a more leisurely vacation on the Sixty Islands.

Ultimately, the book is more akin to a comic book in prose form, fun but not very deep.

7

Charles Packer