Falling Into Oblivion by Aaron M. Payne

TL;DR: Maybe not for me, the progression of the story is a bit predictable with nothing but bad things and “sighs” happening to the main character.
Source: via the Author, thank you for the ARC!

Plot: A police officer in a horrible future is trying to work his way out of debt and ends up on a bad case.
Characters: The best I can tell you about Sol is he sighs a lot and he really loves his family. There isn’t much else that I can remember about him besides his intense prejudice towards people and their choices.
Setting: A dystopian cyberpunk style world. It felt familiar, so easily visualized.
Science Fiction: This is ‘low’ SF. The mods and tech is there but not deeply explained.

Thoughts:

Falling Into Oblivion is the classic ‘good cop in a bad system’ cyberpunk novel it looks to be. There is a lot of build up for a possible series and a lot of potential. It was a bit of a miss for me, coming in with a low three star on a ranking though.

Our protagonist, Sol, is the only character that we get any amount of time with or find any true depth in. He’s a cop trying his hardest to take cases that will allow him to pay for his daughter’s education in a fancy school because he hates public schools. He’s also looked down upon for his lack of augments, and in turn looks down on all those who have them. This is the extent of what I took from this book. While Sol is meant, I believe, to be a “Good Guy” he comes off as a very judgmental, and very shallow.

The story itself is simple. His cases all fit together, and he sighs his way through the book and solving the case. In an interesting twist his ending was not quite what I expected. That was about the only thing that stood out to me as he spent the whole time judging others, daydreaming about a family we saw for all of maybe five lines, and stumbling into solutions. This was just not for me – but if you’re huge fan of cyberpunk style books this is definitely one to try.