Decent debut novel about a dystopian future where pharmaceutical pirate Jack reverse engineers patented drugs to distribute cheaply to those desperately in need but unable to afford them. Fine so far, until the work-enhancement drug she reverse engineers turns out to be fatally flawed, a fact which the pharma company has been covering up. As Jack's copy of the drug causes serious fatalities, Jack rushes to find a cure while Big Pharma hire hit man Eliasz and robot sidekick Paladin to find and eliminate her in order to cover up the fact their drug is fatally flawed.

Sounds good so far, right? Overall it's a very interesting world and plot line, and I enjoyed the read. However, I found the character development rather awkwardly done and I never really felt really wrapped up with any of them. I probably liked Paladin best, but there's a plot thread where Paladin (a completely genderless robot) keeps having a gender identify forced upon it by humans and I didn't feel this was handled well AT ALL. The outright homophobia of Eliasz is never directly addressed or improved at all, and Paladin seems inexplicably accepting of being treated in ways that it frequently acknowledges to itself are completely incorrect and inapplicable.

There was also a potentially interesting side plot about how the emancipation of AI robots (who are manufactured with a period of indenture to pay off the costs) led to the corollary that if intelligent robots could be indentured then so could humans, creating an industry of essentially indentured human slavery. This was touched on in a few places but I thought it could have led to much more interesting details and ended up being a fairly irrelevant side thread of the story that didn't really go anywhere.

The conclusion was also a bit disappointing as there's a lead up to a big confrontation, which then isn't very clearly described, and then we simply find out in retrospective exposition what happened and how it neatly resolved all the hanging plot threads. It felt very abrupt and very deus ex machina. So, can't really give this a 5 overall but it was still full of interesting ideas and an interesting setting, and is an interesting debut novel.