Bang Bang Bodhisattva

Aubrey Wood
Completed 5/27/2024, Reviewed 5/27/2024
5 stars

This is another 2024 Lambda Literary Award nominee for Speculative Fiction.  If I had just read the tag line, I probably wouldn’t have picked it up.  It’s cyberpunk noir, two genres I generally don’t like.  Turns out, I really loved this book.  I read it in a day.  Well, technically, two days.  I started at ten in the morning and finished at one the next morning.  I found it well written, fast-paced, and above all I understood everything going on.  Usually, cyberpunk loses me in the usually large amount of invented jargon.  This book takes place only ten years in the future, so all the technology is just a little more advanced than today.  And even though a lot has to do with streaming games, which I don’t play, I understood enough that I didn’t get lost.  I also don’t always like noir, but this mystery really pulled me in.  This book really clicked for me and I forced myself to stay up to see who the murderer was.

The story is about an ex-cop PI named Angel who often teams up with a transitioning woman named Kiera to help with cyber research and occasionally getting into places he has been banned from.  One day, he gets a job from his ex-wife to find her new husband whose been missing for a week.  Turns out the man is the attorney for Kiera, helping her with pro bono work to help her change her legal identity.  When they find the attorney’s body and call it in, they are immediately made prime suspects.  More bodies pile up and Angel and Kiera get more and more implicated in all the deaths.  In addition, Kiera meets and kind of falls for a person named Nile at a party who mysteriously disappears.  After finding Nile’s hand chopped off at their apartment, they look for them too, since it seems the disappearance is related to the murders.  Since the cops are focused on Angel and Kiera, they must do their own investigating to clear their names.  Their only lead is a burned stick of Nag Champa incense left at every scene.

The best thing about this story is the rocky relationship between Kiera and Angel.  Angel is a gruff guy who’s almost old enough to be Kiera’s father.  Kiera is an almost thirty-year-old who does odd jobs for money.  Despite the love-hate relationship between the two, she always goes back to helping him because the money’s good.  But now they’re tied together because of this murder rap.  The result is a buddy story with lots of light and dark humor.  Their relationship also brings out the theme of finding and sticking to one’s authentic self against all the odds.  I really liked them both and got a kick out of their constant banter throughout the investigation.

I thought the writing was terrific for a thriller, with just the right amount of prose amid the fast-paced dialogue.  The descriptions never slowed down the action, but provided the right amount of world building and mood setting.  I thought the ending was very realistic as well, leaving enough uncertainty of the final resolution for each character to let you guess for yourself how it would end.  We do find out who the murderer is, but we’re left guessing about Angel and Kiera’s final decisions.  I thought it was a great way to end a book.  

I give this novel five stars out of five.  I was floored by how much I loved the characters and their personal journeys through the mystery.  I also thought the state of the world was masterfully imagined, so much like our own today, but extrapolated ten years in the future.  I would definitely read more by this author.  I think she has a great vision and a wealth of personal experience to pour into her stories, considering she’s also a biracial trans woman with both and inside an outside view of what’s going on in our society today.