The Automatic Detective

4.5 stars really, enjoyed the the flat humor of the automaton.

I got this book out of the blue. It surprised in a very positive way. It's funny, fast paced and entertaining. Excellent light reading - if you like Terry Pratchett and want to read something different.

Instantly promoted to want to read more from these guys

This book combines the feel of hard-boiled with the joys of a Sci-Fi novel. I’ve never seen this cross genre before but The Automatic Detective pulls it off so well. The best description I’ve found about this book was by a Goodreads user; ‘Raymond Chandler and William Gibson had one drunken night, nine months later, this book would be born’. I’m not sure if there will be anymore books in the series, but I secretly hope for more.

I'm a sucker for learning-to-be-human robot protagonists so this story appealed to me right from the first chapter, with its likable hero Mack Megaton (created by an evil genius mad scientist inventor to lead a robot army of doom, but now reformed and working as a cab driver trying to earn his citizenship in Technotopia).

The writing is light-hearted and highly readable, a pseudo pulp detective/gumshoe type novel with Mack playing the reluctant investigator. I hadn't read anything by this author before, but I'll definitely pick up a sequel to this if there are any, and perhaps look into some of his other books.

Fredric Brown meets Terry Pratchett.

Or, 1940s detective pulp noir fiction meets a wacky science fiction universe.

Either way, The Automatic Detective is a light, funny, well-written novel. It never goes awry. Considering the sorry state of modern genre publishing, that's an achievement in itself.

The adventures of Mack Megaton, an erstwhile killing machine burdened with free will and a conscience, make for a good read. A. Lee Martinez hits the right notes and nods to the classic elements of the pulp noir detective story. I did note a few passages that seemed oddly repetitious - enough to make me wonder if the book had first been serialized in a magazine, and then imperfectly fixed up - but these are only the mildest of flaws. I hope to see a sequel, or several, and I'll keep an eye out for more by Mr. Martinez.