Company Town by Madeline Ashby

I have had trouble starting this review. I think it's because, in the main, I want to recommend this book. And I do! However, there is one chapter where I think the book falls apart a little bit, and although it picks itself up again quite nicely, it confused me so much that it does stand out as the low point, at a section of the plot that should really have been an apex.

Let's explore what I mean in more details - which means there will be some spoilers. If you don't want spoilers, let me say that this is very good Canadian cyberpunk, set on a rig off the coast of Newfoundland, where many of the characters are unionized sex workers, and many of the others new corporate lackeys.

This does, however, mean that we fall into difficult territory of a string of murders of dead prostitutes, which is dangerous and tricky territory. It is, though, as Ebert always said, not what it is about, but how it is about it. So, I want to think about that. These are not faceless women - they are the friends of the main character, who at the start of the book, worked as security for the sex worker's union, protecting the women who are being killed. In what might be splitting hairs, while these deaths are bad ones, they are not sexualized.  It's closer to the main character in the Maltese Falcon trying to avenge his partner than anything else.

I'm still a little on the fence about this, but nothing felt egregiously wrong, if that makes sense. It's just hard territory to get right, and I'm not really sure what right would look like.

What is the plot, do you ask? Hwa is a young woman with a genetic condition that covers her face with a red blotch - incidentally, this messes up facial recognition software, and makes her particularly useful in doing security, which she does for the sex workers union, after having dropped out of school. She lives and works (and never leaves, few people ever leave) on an oil rig/city out on the ocean off the coast of Newfoundland, and you can hear the Newfoundland slang in the characters' voices.

Near the start of the book, though, she gets hired by the new company in town, the one that has bought the whole place, lock, stock, and all the property in between. The youngest son of this family business has been receiving death threats, and she is hired to go back to high school with him and keep him safe. Her handler is Daniel Siofra, a man whose past is a mystery - even to himself. Her charge, Joel, is an earnest and likeable young man - far too likeable to be the next likely successor to a multi-national.

Attacks do come, some by someone invisible. Meanwhile, some of the women Hwa used to guard, her friends, are killed. She keeps the corporate job because it gives her computer access to investigate what happened to the women who died. Oh, and there might be interference in what's going on from the future. There's a lot going on.

I generally really liked this book. However, there is one chapter where the pacing broke down. I seriously thought that section was a dream - the character thinks that idly, and in a short number of pages, we were jumping locations and events in what felt like a dream-like fashion, and so I wasn't bothered that too many huge plot twists were happening in a single chapter. I was sure that they were Hwa putting pieces together unconsciously and that the events hadn't actually happened.

I was wrong. They did all happen. And although Hwa had a seizure at the end of the chapter, and the previous pages could be her altered state of mind leading up to the seizure, we never got to be with her as she sorted out what happened and what didn't and why. So then I was playing catch-up, trying to move events out of the spot where my brain had sorted them as dream-stuff, not real-stuff.

It's just the one chapter. Either the pacing is bad, or it's a good effort to try to capture her state of mind in the middle of an insanely stressful situation, but lacks the follow-up to bring that home. It's unfortunate. Outside of that, though, this is very sold cyberpunk, rooted solidly in class and gender disparities.