"Unlawful Presence"

★★★

Positives and Negatives...

​...which is why the 3 stars

​The negatives? Too many characters crammed into a too-involved plot with not enough time to get to know any of them. They weren't badly written, just no depth to appreciate what they were going through.

​As for the plot, as mentioned, it took off like a bullet from a gun as we meet the Android Deactivation Squad, but instead of giving the reader time to flesh out the purpose of the story with a nice build-up: meeting/getting to know the characters, developing and understanding for what's happening, the author rambles in a fragmentary manner because he's trying to fill in too much stuff into too few pages. It would have worked better had he separated some of the story and maybe made it a prequel/sequel or something.

​Another reason for the 3 stars is because of the campy dialogue which wasn't realistic. It was like the author took what he'd heard spoken in movies and regurgitated it here. When not in that manner, it was too much detail, as if trying to fill in the gaps of the plot; or, just dumb. Example of the dumb: Vanessa meets Oscar. He tells her he's from Bogota, Colombia and then adds: "My father is a wealthy capitalist pig who grows rich from the sweat of the oppressed working class." First of all, who talks like that especially at a first meeting? Really? I actually laughed out loud--as I did many times at the absurdity of the dialogue.

​Positives? It wasn't poorly written mechanically and the plot did have potential. It ended too abruptly, but I think that with a re-write it could be a good book.