Apr 162014
 

Cover of Koko Takes a Holiday by Kiernan Shea. A badass woman with short, electric blue hair and white face/ black lips/ eyeliner goth make-up stands almost profile but looking at us. She's dressed from neck to wrists in a tight-fitting, futurist-looking black outfit, with an enormous, vivid-yellow and black gun slung on her shoulder like she's about to swing it around and shoot. The background is white and red stripes with action scenes illustrated in black and yellow ink in the red stripes.Library Journal: VERDICT: Shea takes us 500 years into Earth’s future, a place apparently decadent and war-torn in equal measures. Reminiscent of Takeshi Kovaks from Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon with a dash of Tank Girl attitude, Koko is memorable character. The violence is quite extreme, so the squeamish should probably look elsewhere, but this is a fun gender reversal of your typical shoot-em-up SF.

Brothel manager Koko Martstellar was living a comfortable life on the pleasure resort of The Sixty Islands, but her former career as a mercenary returns to haunt her in this SF/crime fiction debut. Her former comrade-in-arms, who had helped her get her job in the “hospitality industry,” suddenly and inexplicably hires someone to kill Koko. On the run, Koko heads to the an orbital platform in the Second Free Zone where  former policeman Flynn puts his suicide plans on hold to help her to evade those looking to collect the bounty on her head.