Annabel Scheme (Annabel Scheme)
Robin Sloan
Annabel Scheme is a detective story set in an alternate San Francisco where the digital and the occult live side-by-side. It's a short, snappy read -- about 128 pages/128,000 Kindle locations -- and perfect for people who like Sherlock Holmes, Douglas Adams, ghosts and/or the internet. Finally, it makes a great Kindle gift. In Scheme's San Francisco, an indie rocker's new tracks are climbing the charts, even though the rocker herself is long dead. A devout gamer has gone missing, and the only trace of him that remains is inside his favorite game, the blockbuster MMORPG called World of Jesus. And the richest man in the city, the inventor of the search engine called Grail, might just have made a deal with a devil. Meanwhile, Annabel Scheme has just hired herself a Watson, an A.I. assistant who's now learning the ropes on a case that will quickly transform into Scheme's biggest -- and possibly her last. Come on. Fog City is waiting.
Publication Year: 2010
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0Just changed my rating from 5 to 4 stars because upon reflection I felt it was basically the first few chapters of a longer book, and he should have gone ahead and finished it. If this was the first installment of a serial, I'd have been thrilled, but I don't think it is.
Despite my complaints about what wasn't right about this book, I still give it a high rating because I really enjoy Sloan's writing and world building. I liked the setup. I liked the action. There just wasn't enough of it.
The world in this book is substantially different than that (those?) in the 24-Hour Bookstore and Sourdough, much more nihilistic, perhaps apocalyptic.
I do like an AI character, especially as a first-person narrator (I don't think that's a spoiler), and I like this AI quite a bit. I liked the title character as well, though the choice of a last name was occasionally distracting and confusing. I feel like I missed a metaphor there.
Anyway, it's short, so if you like novellas, I recommend it. Just don't expect a satisfying ending.
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