„TRUTH; As long as the job's all about murder, I don't care who it is.“
I was having fun with the playable robot mod, and decided that I can make a character out of this. He started out as the base Sentry bot, with just one minigun for the challenge... Which didn't actually make it harder as the minigun shredded through everything. Eventually, I started doing jobs. After jobs... Jobs... And many more jobs, I upgraded my robot along as I went, giving him a personality of my own.
Backstory? Not much.
Mister Slaughter was randomly booted up by scavengers trying to hack stuff off from his chassis after a long time of being asleep. Of course, as any sane military robot would do, he absolutely obliterated said scavengers and went on his way. He learnt more and more about the world, and eventually... Adapted to it. He got horrified, but friendly settlers to weld things onto his armor that would make him more intimidating. It would basically make him blend into the aesthetics of most wastelanders.
And on his journey to find something to do, he found Goodneighbor... Ever since, he's been taking on jobs where he has to kill. Because that's what he's good at. Killing.
So, for anyone who has been following me for a while might know, I am a huge fan of the Matthew Corbett series of novels. Unfortunately, I can't say that Mister Slaughter really lived up to the expectations which I had of the series.
What had originally drawn me to the Matthew Corbett series was that they were historical mysteries with touches of other genres; a bit like an eighteenth century Sherlock Holmes in a lot of ways, but without much of what I disliked about Doyle's writing. They were also a hell of a lot of fun, had excellent world and character building, with great building suspense resulting in a a crash read to the finish line because I just couldn't put the book down until I'd finished it. I just needed to know how everything all fit together; how it all would end.
Unfortunately with Mister Slaughter, the mystery is espoused in favour of a pursuit narrative. While there is a mystery, it unfolds in relation to the chase and more builds background rather than creating a sense of tension and that there's something bigger going on, that it's building to some big climax and reveal. That, I felt, was missing and that the narrative relied too heavily on the chase, on the shock of what Slaughter would do next.
But here's the thing: the shock value quickly wears off. Slaughter's single appearance in The Queen of Bedlam made him a far more intriguing character than he actually is here, where he is the focus of the novel and its driving antagonist. The result is that he's much of a cobbled together villain, uninteresting and rather derivative of many other serial killers – he feels too much like Sweeney Todd.
There's certainly some great aspects and the ending (without spoiling anything) is particularly chilling, it still fails to live up to the high expectations that the previous novels set. While it's still probably going to be something that fans of the series will read, anyone who's a more casual reader in regards to the series won't enjoy it much and it will probably turn them off the series for good and I can't, in good faith, recommend it.
For anyone looking for a fun, historical thriller mystery, then you're out of luck here. Read the first two novels in the series, but I'd say give this one a pass unless you're already invested in Matthew's adventures.
Next to a challenging question or a problem that needed solving, Matthew loved books. So it was with both great pleasure and gut-wrenching dismay that he took appraisal of the library's ruin. Pleasure because though most of the books had been swept from their shelves, they still lay in a pile on the floor; and dismay, because someone had thrown dozens of volumes into the fireplace and their black bindings were heaped up like so many bones.
The first set of five books that I'm reading for #loveyourshelf. I've already finished two of them (Marvel 1602 and Superman: Birthright), so I'm going to start on Mister Slaughter next as I promised myself that if I could finish it, then I could buy the fifth book in the series, The River of Souls.
Also, I now have an instagram, so if you wanna follow me there I will be posting pictures of my progress there first before tumblr. I am so late to this party.
