#Review - A Sh*tload of Crazy Powers by Jackson Ford

A Sh*tload of Crazy Powers (The Frost Files, 4)
Jackson Ford
Orbit, 12 May 2022
Available as: PB, 496pp, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 978-0356514673

I'm grateful to Nazia at Orbit for an advance copy of A Sh*tload of Crazy Powers to consider for review.

With book 4 in a series, there can be a risk of things becoming stale. Still readable, yes, still what you came to it to get, but - flat. After all, why change anything and risk putting people off?

It's a trap that Jackson Ford avoids here with aplomb. Crazy Powers - while I don't want to say too much about its outcome - upends the safe little world (well, for rather exotic values of "safe") that Teagan Frost, possessor of awesome psychokinetic (PK) abilities and would-be chef (if she can ever scrape together the money to train) has inhabited so far.

A recap. Teagan ('She has zero strategic skills, no filter, a constant ability to screw up even the best-laid plans. She can be ungrateful and whiny, and she takes sarcasm to an Olympic level') was gifted her abilities by mad-scientist parents who endowed her brother and sister with equally awesome, but different, powers (seeing infrared and never having to sleep, respectively). Teagan's brother then killed her parents and sister, and she herself was snapped up by the US Government which uses her for black ops in the Los Angeles area. Over the previous three books we've seen this situation gently come apart, culminating, at the end of Book 3, Eye of the Sh*t Storm, in Teagan sitting in hospital with her friend Annie, who's in a coma, and blaming herself for that. 

This story picks up exactly where that previous one ended. Teagan is still battered, drained and haunted by the earlier events, and may have fatally exposed the secret of her powers by saving hundreds of people from a horrifying death, but she gets no rest, oh no. Ford plunges her into the midst of a kidnap attempt which leads up to one of those fabled LA police chases, all broadcast live on ghoulish news networks. From that point it only gets worse and worse. China Shop, the outfit for which Teagan works, is tasked with providing security for a convention of arms dealers (in an LA hotel? Something seems a bit off here) - and she's not even started to recover from recent events...

I loved this book. Totally loved it. Ford blends together a pack of irritable, exhausted operatives, living on shreds of their nerves; a new group of antagonists in the form of a weird, religious cult; and a bizarre location - the hotel itself, a gothic pile with rumoured hidden tunnels, a helipad and secret rooms. And a mystery, whose unpicking will show the whole sequence of books so far in a new light. He's also very sharp on the setting - we meet 'people who are able to take a red pen to black budgets' (watch out, China Shop!) in a milieu where 'Like most crowds of rich people, it's a mostly white, mostly male demographic.')

At the same time, old antagonists also return, affording Annie, who's a likeable and interesting character, a whole adventure of her own in parallel to that of Teagan and the rest. Annie is also battered and bruised, and her escapade - accompanied by Teagan's boyfriend Nic (is there a bit of a spark there? Ouch...) - gives an opportunity for her to reflect on her own early life, sharing details with the reader that we didn't know before. It also illuminates the relationship between her and Teagan, revealing a much more human side to both that Teagan's endless banter and Annie's chilliness has so far concealed. (Teagan's friendship with ex-gangster and drug dealer Annie is touching - 'Teagan is one of the most exasperating, irritating and confusing people that Annie has ever met... but she is also her friend. Maybe her only real friend.')

Both women, basically, get put through the mill here - one can almost taste their weariness and pain - and it's made plain that both care about much more than their own survival. There's a bond there, but there's also a sense of wider ethics and involvement in society, and perhaps also a sense of growing up, maturing (a bit. A little bit.) A reminder that they're not just action heroes. As you'd expect, it makes this a compelling and must-read instalment of this series and one which sets things up for another which I'll eagerly await. Truly, Teagan (and Ford) throw lots of sh*t up in the air and who knows where it will ever come down?

For more information about A Sh*tload of Crazy Powers see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Eye of the Sh*t Storm by Jackson Ford

Eye of the Sh*t Storm (The Frost Files, 3)

Jackson Ford
Orbit, 29 April 2021
Available as: PB, 496pp, e, audio
Source: Advance e-copy provided by the publisher
ISBN(PB): 9780356514666

I'm grateful to Orbit for an advance e-copy of Eye of the Sh*t Storm.

'So it turns out, you can totally fall asleep while escaping from a gunfight on the back of a really loud motorcycle.'

I was watching the Oscars last night, broadcast from Union Station, Los Angeles. But I didn't see the glitz and glamour, oh no. I saw an exhausted Teagan Frost and her gang breaking into the empty station at night to escape from an increasingly dystopian, post The Big One, LA.

That scene really is in the book, so if you want to orient yourself, go and look at the coverage. 

You'll have to imagine, though, that things are somewhat more desperate that you can see on TV... 

In this one, Teagan is definitely running on empty. A few months after the events of Random Sh*t Flying Through the Air, China Shop, the removal firm that's really a secret agency, is falling apart after the loss of a key member of the team. Teagan, whose psychokinetic ability is at the centre of the operation (she really is The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t With Her Mind, appears on the brink of losing her other, found family (her birth family, who made her what she is, having died years before). Teagan's alienated her boyfriend, colleague Annie hates her and she's STILL no closer to doing that chef's course (in fact, further off, since most of LA's kitchens no longer exist).

It is, I'd say, a doomier book than the previous parts of The Frost Files. LA was devastated in the earthquake that China Shop couldn't prevent (although they stopped it being much, much worse). What's left is a ruined landscape full of shuttered businesses, unsafe buildings and homeless people trying to keep their lives together. The team seek refuge in Union Station because it's shut and they need somewhere to go. Transport across the city is difficult with bridges down and roads blocked, and many of Teagan's favourite restaurants are no more. As the gang, splitting into different factions, set out on a nightmarish journey to reunite a young boy with his father, there's a real feeling of things falling apart.

It's not only exhaustion, hunger and hostile forces that bring the darkness. The events of the first two books have left scars, and Teagan - who is, remember, very young - is clearly struggling. With guilt, afraid that she - or what she is - caused much of the harm, and that she may do more. With relationships, having drifted away from her boyfriend Nic (though he pops up again here to give her an excoriating lecture on racial assumptions and privilege - Teagan's put her foot in it again: "I still tried to tell a black American about how the law wouldn't protect me.") And with the dark legacy of how her powers arose, and who else may share them.

The book is, basically, a single desperate chase, running from one danger into another with very little time to consider the bigger picture or work out what may be happening. There's a little reflection on that from Reggie, Teagan's quadriplegic handler (and we learn more about Reggie's past too) and also from Moira Tanner, their distant and scary boss in Washington DC, but these don't interrupt the flow much, it's action, action, action for Teagan and the stakes are scarily high. 

If you have read either of the previous books in this series you'll know more or less what to expect, but there is a sense here that Ford has now got into top gear, and the pages of this book simply fly by. I really, really can't imagine what's going to happen in Book 4 - because, no, The Frost Files isn't a trilogy and with Teagan getting in touch with her roots (as well as picking up a couple of new and lamentable habits along the way) there is a strong sense by the end of this book that ANYTHING could happen next.

A firm recommendation from me for this one, and if you haven't caught up with the series yet, DO IT NOW.

For more information about Eye of the Sh*t Storm, see the publisher's website here.

Review - The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t with her Mind

Cover by Steve Panton

The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t with her Mind
Jackson Ford
Orbit, 20 June 2019
PB, 444pp

I'm grateful to Nazia at Orbit for a free advance copy of this book.

The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t with her Mind is Jackson Ford's debut novel, it's published today, and you should read it.

Teagan Frost is having a bad day at work. A VERY bad day. It begins when a routine job goes wrong, endangering her and a colleague, gets worse when her boss gives her a carpeting for how she got out of that situation, and positively implodes when she's framed for murder and has to go on the run as the city of Los Angeles burns around her.

Oh, due to being on the run, she has to miss a date with a nice, single man at THE up and coming restaurant in LA.

And she hasn't slept in 48 hours.

Welcome to the world of The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t with her Mind. Teagan is The Girl, and she can, indeed, move - stuff - mentally, a talent referred to as psychokinesis (Boss Paul won't let her call it PK for reasons explained herein). That talent's employed in the service of a secretive branch of Government, Teagan's cooperation the price she pays for not being taken away to a secret lab and vivisected to find out how she works. It doesn't make her very happy, but it's a living, and as long as she's living, she can dream and plan about opening her own restaurant.

I just LOVED this book. It's a non-stop, hectic chase around the seedy side of LA (presented with no glitz and glamour: somewhat reminiscent of Joseph Wambaugh's LA based police procedurals) as Teagan and her colleagues seek to establish her innocence while a mysterious opponent plays them from street to street, mall to mall and scuzzy diner to scuzzy diner. And that fire just keeps getting closer.

Written largely from Teagan's point of view and giving us a lively, if rather pissed-off, protagonist who's perhaps just a little too persuaded that she's right and that everyone around her is stupid, the book is nothing if not engaging. For a story with such a gaping, fanatical premise - PK is real, people, and can be genetically engineered - the writing makes it very believable. Getting the register and attitude of a bored, annoyed and overtired employee in a dead end job just right, Ford evokes roughly the same psychological/ bureaucratic space as Charles Stross's Laundry books, except that Teagan's not a diffident English male geek but a forthright LA woman with views on everything, especially food. And rap music. And her colleagues. And did I mention food?

It is, really, simply fun and a joy to read - though it does go to some very dark places. Teagan's Nemesis, whose point of view also features, is a truly grim and mixed-up person, especially dangerous for being convinced of being right (and, indeed, having some degree of justice to back that up) and does some truly grim and mixed-up things. And, as I've said, the book doesn't spare us the seamier side of the city, presenting the paradox of a vast area where the homeless live in tents amidst the wealth of one of the world's richest cities. There are also gangs, corruption and a particularly nasty black-ops soldier who really has it in for Teagan.

When you see what Teagan has to go before she can have a meal, a sleep and a beer, you won't be surprised how cross she gets - but you might be surprised by the results...

In all, a great read and, yes, I can see this becoming a popular and I hope long-running series. I wouldn't want to work with Teagan Frost but I do want to read more about her, please Mr Ford and please, O Orbit.

For more about the book, see the Orbit website here.