Similar to the television series "Heroes," Ridley's Those Who Walk in Darkness is a science fiction piece extrapolating a future where mutants with various superpowers roam the earth, some of whom are bad, so bad that San Francisco is gone. Soledad is a police officer with a special squad who are dedicated to hunting done the mutants. The stark reality of her rookie battles with the mutants (or freaks as they call them) is played out quite graphically and Soledad is an unusual woman who is dedicated to her mission no matter what no matter the odds. A police procedural and a science fiction story all rolled into one. Action fills this tale, although for some reason it feels a bit choppy and is a slower read than it should be. ( )

Soledad "Bullet" O'Roark is a super-power hunter, taking some of them down with a gun of her own invention. She's a cop with issues and has problems with relationships and her world is such that she keeps trying to connect with someone but no-one likes her life for long enough to stick around and try to make her open up and other members of the team die too often for it to be reasonable for her to date one.

It's an interesting read but somehow it's not quite as interesting as it could be. I didn't really connect with the characters or the situations they were getting into. ( )

This was a fairly interesting book. There are these mutants you see, and when they first popped up, they were superheroes (and villains) like in the comic books. Then one of them blew up San Fransisco, and being a mutant in the US became a capitol offense. There's a certain branch of the police called the MTacs who are tasked with hunting down and executing the mutants. This book is about one of those cops, callesd Soledad.

None of this is particularly original of course. Any one who grew up reading the X-Men like I did will have more or less seen it before. The only real difference between this and some of the X-Men stories is that it's cops hunting the mutants not giant robotic Sentinels and this story is told from the mutant hunter's point of view.

It's not a particularly sympathetic point of view either. At best I feel pity for the main character, at worst I think she belongs in either a jail cell or the looney bin. She's filled with so much (largely unjustifiable) hate that it's hard to like her. She, and the rest of the MTacs aren't any better than Nazis when you get right down to it.

Still, this book is somewhat thought provoking and is exciting. If you like superhero comics, you'll probably like this. ( )

http://www.sfreader.com/read_review.asp?ID=397 ( )