The third book, and clearly not the last, in Jeff Somer’s series of Avery Cates novels, is a serious return to form after the relative disappointment that was The Digital Plague. In that book, Cates was manipulated in to being the vector for a deadly virus, and he has survived the experience only to eventually return to New York and witness a devastated city, three quarters of the population dead from the plague. As The Eternal Prison opens, he is being rounded up by the System Security Force and dragged off to a prison in the middle of Death Valley, apparently considered to be a Person of Interest. and the fight seems to have gone out of him.

The prison holds mysteries aplenty: prison guards who appear almost from thin air, inmates who mysteriously vanish, and several enigmatic old lags who want a piece of Avery, including one who claims to have known Avery’s father, in the days before everything changed. Avery becomes enmeshed in violence, of course – he’s a professional killer, so that’s no surprise – and an escape attempt. He even comes as close as he ever has to falling in love.

The narrative structure of this book is one of the things that make it so much more engaging and enjoyable than its predecessor – by interweaving a post-prison narrative with the story of Avery’s capture and incarceration, there’s a lot to take in, and questions to ponder about how the story will unfold (and there’s a serious twist that I didn’t see coming which had me grinning with admiration).

It’s clearly Avery Cates’ fate to be manipulated, and this book continues the trend – with ‘King Worm’ Dick Marin and a new faction now engaged in a civil war for control of the system, both sides want to use the System’s most famous gunner for their own ends. He rails against it, of course, but somehow always ends up doing what he is expected to do, going where he is expected to go – and where Avery Cates goes, people die. This is a very clever, dark and often amusing piece of near-future noir, that reveals hitherto unimagined depths to Somers’ dystopian conception, and suggested that the story of Avery Cates has some way to run. The Appendix that rounds out the book is a surprising poignant piece of writing that reminds us too that, in the story of gunner Cates, we should not forget the other characters that inhabit Somers’ blighted world. Bravo.

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