Clean by Alex Hughes
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This was a totally adequate book. This is a futuristic police procedural featuring a telepath who acts as an interrogator, a case of “You’ve got Urban Fantasy in my SF,” “No, you’ve got SF in my Urban Fantasy.”
The telepath in question is a recovering drug addict on his last second chance — and that was pretty well done. I work with a log of people in Recovery, and this rang true. But beyond that, he was sort of a stock PI-type down on his luck. The same goes for his tough, driven and beautiful Homicide detective partner, and the various superiors they have — even his sponsor. They’re all characters we’ve seen dozens upon dozens of times before. To an extent, that’s forgivable in a first novel in a series, you’re building a world, setting up everything, you can skate by with mostly stock characters, as long as you flesh them out later. But there wasn’t a single original character.
The plot wasn’t much better once you strip away the Mindspace parts of the equation.
At the end of the day, for all it had going for it, Clean just wasn’t all that well-written. Too often it read like something I’d write on my best day (and I’m fully aware of my limitations) — sure, it its moments, and the last 40 or so pages, really delivered. But that was more plot than execution, by that point, as long as she wasn’t being incoherent, it would work — it was just getting to that point that was the struggle. It was the setup and curiosity that got me to that point.
It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if one day I really liked Hughes’ stuff, but today wasn’t that day.