This is a refreshing new book that you actually can’t buy! All the links in this post go to the official site where you can download the book for free. Unfortunately it’s only available in PDF which is a bit of a pain but STFU already, it’s FREE! And it’s great! Annabel Scheme is written by Robin Sloan who is definitely near the top of my list of cool people I met when I was living in San Francisco. He’s a genuinely funny guy which is why I was so surprised when I heard he released a science fiction book. I got the book to my Kindle via the Amazon “Mail us a PDF and we’ll do our worst to format it for your Kindle and overcharge you for the pleasure of doing business” service so there was a little cost there. And for the most part the book came in tact although at random intervals it injects a seemingly random page number and the authors name in the middle of a paragraph but it keeps you on your toes.
Annabel Scheme is the story of a techno-occultist detective in San Francisco who is investigating a case where dead musicians are releasing new music and the living partner of a half-deceased duo hires her and her assistant to get to the bottom of it. It’s got some cool tech references and throws demons and quantum computers into the mix and all in all it’s a delightful book and I hope there will be more to come. It had the feel of what it would be like if Hiro Protagonist from Snow Crash and Douglas Adam’s detective Dirk Gently would have had a baby. Since Snow Crash and the Dirk Gently novels are some of my favorites I liked it a whole lot. It’s pretty short so you could get away with reading it on a computer and the issues aside it worked ok on the Kindle. I’m not going to ruin any of the story but if you’re a geek and especially if you live in San Francisco it’s a must read. Go get it.