The Narconomic Prey of Reviews

Hey,

  I am still reading books.  Let's get to it.

  First up:The Prey of Gods by Nicky Drayden.  This book started off really rocky for me, but picked up considerably by the end.  The setting is a near-future South Africa where people have personal robots and advanced genetic engineering to bring back some extinct species.  It also has an ancient African goddess who is looking to get her mojo back via blood and fear.  This mixture of sci-fi and fantasy is always a difficult sell with me.  As the book rolls forward, it leans more heavily into the fantasy side of things which I think is why the book piked up for me in the back half when it finally settled down.

  So yeah, ancient African goddess wants to disrupt humanity to re-ignite the age of the gods.  To do that, she's taking advantage of a genetics program to bring the local dik-dik population under control and the recent introduction of a new designer drug that gives people a glimpse into their divine nature.  Opposing her is a young girl who might be more creation than child, a young teen who can't quite say "I love you" to his boyfriend, and the young man's personal robot whose 1's and 0's are starting to turn into 2's.

  There's a lot of good world-building (both sci-fi and fantasy) and the characters are pretty well fleshed out.  While the book has a fairly serious plot, there's some really fun bits of dialog and humor.  I'm a little cranky about mixing genre's but I did enjoy the book and if you're less snobbish, you'll probably like it start to finish.  There's clearly some openings left for a sequel, but the book stands pretty solidly on it's own.

  Next, Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Empire by Tom Wainwright.  Mr. Wainwright is a journalist for the Economist magazine and he spent a number of months examining the drug trade as a business and what sorts of economic forces bear on it.  From fields of coca in Bolivia, poppies in Mexico, weed in Colorado, and designer drug labs in New Zealand, he looks at how drug cartels create, ship and sell their product.  He runs the numbers to show how the value of drugs increases along each step of the chain from growers to consumers and how the cartels maximize that value, both through violence and basic business management.

  He covers a lot of ground and at the end suggests how we might better spend our money in the fight against drugs.  Not surprisingly, like many people who've investigated drug trafficking, attacking the issue of demand (treating addicts and using public campaigns to prevent new ones) tends to produce a better return on investment than attacking the issue of supply (spraying fields, border security, and the like).  The solutions don't seem terribly new to me, but it was an interesting look at how criminal businesses operate and how they interact with each other.

  I also finished up the last book in the Swallows and Amazons series, but that's a separate post.

later
Tom