This Ragged, Wastrel Thing by Tomas Marcantonio

What Da Cover Says:  This Ragged, Wastrel Thing: Book One of Tomas Marcantonio’s Sonaya Nights Trilogy.

After serving eleven years in The Heights for the murder of his childhood sweetheart, one-eared vagabond Daganae Kawasaki is finally free. But beneath the neon glare of a sprawling Sonaya, he soon discovers the backstreets are bursting with strange new shadows. Confronting plucky street orphans, bitter biker girls and down-and-out expats, Dag is swiftly embroiled in a fresh homicide case – and finds his murky past isn’t done with him yet.

What I Says:  Ooooh!  This is one slick story, you are quickly drawn into a world of dark squalor, flashing neon and a big old helping of booze & violence.  If you are a fan of In the Miso Soup by Ryū Murakami then you’ll gonna love this, you get that same feeling of seediness and the lack of general remorse at death from the characters,  in Sonaya death happens every day,  if you’re weak you ain’t gonna make it.

The point of view from this book is from Daganae Kawasaki, it reads like the old Philip Marlowe detective novels, you have that constant internal monologue going on and at times he can be quite witty.  Seeing everything from Dagenae’s point of view worked well for me, you only know what he knows and even though you can see others plotting you’re stuck inside his head for the ride.  The are plenty of wonderful characters in the book and one of the best bits is, you’ve know idea who is on what side.

Sonaya itself is one hell of place, very futuristic, drones flying around filming everything you do, that gap between rich and poor is greater than ever.  Marcantonio brings in some interesting ideas, a new type of taxation depending on how hot you are, the higher the rating the tougher life will be….personally being a 10 I would find this future quite a tough place to survive.

I have enjoyed this story big time,  I’m so looking forward to the next one in the series, the only issue is I can’t see all my favourite characters surviving to the end…there be dark times ahead.

Massive thanks to Storgy for this review copy.  Check out the book HERE.  This one is highly recommended by me.

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