Review: Junkyard Cats by Faith Hunter

Junkyard Cats by Faith Hunter
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Great Dystopian Sci-Fi

I love Faith Hunter and I particularly enjoy listening to Khristine Hvam’s narration of her books. Buying this book was a no-brainer despite being a different genre from Ms Hunter’s usual works.

This work is set decades in the future, after several world wars and invasion of ‘bugs” from space. Shining Smith is a survivor of the wars, she lives in a junkyard left to her by her deceased father and is kept company by an office AI, called Gomez, a war-bot inhabited by a very damaged human soldier Matteo and dozens of cats.

This story starts with Shining discovering a dead body in the trunk of a car she bought on the black market, covered in bi-coloured ants, a dangerously genetically modified creation that seeks human flesh to consume. Shining survived a bi-coloured swarm attack as a child and still remembers the pain. Not many people survive swarm attacks.

In the footsteps of the dead body an OMW enforcer arrives. The OMW started out as a motorcycle club and became a militia during the wars. 12 year old Shining and her father were part of the OMW and fought alongside the Government against the People’s Republic of China, but Shining was supposed to be dead and things were beginning to mount up, with no time to think.

This story is gripping, filled with drips of information about Shining, her life and the world in which she inhabits. It’s drip feed nature keeps you riveted throughout, and Shining is a complex and compelling character, that you root for, from the start.

As this is an audible original, you can only get the book in audio format, so if you are a Faith Hunter fan, you have probably heard several of the accents and ‘voices’ used before in other books by Ms Hunter. However, this did little to detract from the great story.

I hope a future book in this series comes out soon, because I really enjoyed this one.

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