Reading List: The Automatic Detective

A. Lee Martinez is quickly rising on my list of favorite authors. The only gripe I have with his books are that they are too short. For those of you that do not know, I only read at work, when I'm on a break. I rarely read at home mainly because I'm not usually here and when I am, I'm usually busy doing something else. Anyways, I finished this book in two days at work, that's basically an hour a day so, two hours and this book was toast. The Automatic Detective takes place in Empire City where Mack Megaton, one of the few privileged robots to be up for citizen status struggles through his day as a taxi driver. He spends most of his down time trying to find ways to release his inner rage and trying to adapt his programming to be more socially active. He is after all programmed to destroy humanity as the brainchild of a mad scientist. He turned on his maker and rejected his programming. When a human family he is friends with disappears, he sets out to find them and is quickly surprised at how detective work is more to his liking. His journey takes through a thrill ride of the underworld of Empire City as he deals with Giant Apes, Rat cops, Mutants and many others. Like I said earlier, it is a fast read, quickly jumping through the story at blistering speed while entirely engrossing the reader into the story. As most books by A. Lee Martinez, it is very quirky with some well thought out, slightly crazy situations and can make you laugh and think at the same time. While I enjoyed his previous works more, I really liked this book and I would highly recommend it to anyone. The best thing about the works of Mr Martinez, is that most of them are in paperback and can be found pretty cheap at your local bookstore. So if you re looking for something to make you laugh and present you with a zany enjoyable story, check out any of his books, except maybe the Nameless Witch, that's the only one of his books that kinda left me let down, still a decent book, just not as good as the others.