Review: The Platinum Receiver

Kyle Robertson, The Platinum Receiver (‎PIMI eBooks, 2017)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36290808-the-platinum-retriever

Orphaned before his parents even had a chance to give him a name, Daedalus Platinum is a Retriever, chasing the deadbeat parents of the world. Parents should be obligated, he believes, and when he finds them he makes them pay, with their lives. But he has people chasing him, too—the Obliterators. They just cancel you from the planet, remove your existence.

The Obliterators are aliens, but ‘not from a different planet, they just have a mixture of otherworldly DNA in their system’—in other words, ‘mutts’. Daedalus’ mother’s undead body has been used for xenomorphic procreation. The monsters are his half-siblings. He has some strange power; he’s the only one on Earth who can obliterate them.

Loved: ‘Nature was my mother’s executioner; I was just nature’s axe’, ‘they came at us like cheetahs on the Serengeti’. I loved the fighting in the finale using moves from the various different martial arts schools.

This novel’s Concept is highly innovative. The voice is colloquial, almost gangster, short, sharp sentences, cop-talk-like clichés. The narrator addresses the audience as ‘you’, in daily journal entries, full of sassy 4^th wall asides like ‘That was cathartic. All right, back to the story’.

Verb tenses are all over the place, which is distracting, though it lends a feel of breathlessness. It either needs the grammar sorted out or crafted into a deliberate style choice.