Gunnar Dahlquist is a survivor of Beast War III, a vet with trigger anesthesia, the inability to fight because he’s already killed too many. Banished to a desk job, he finds himself recruited to Intelligence as a spy and there he meets his new partner…a talking cat named Max. Max isn’t an ordinary cat who’s been given the power of speech, however, he’s a Beast, an artificially-produced feline with an equally artificially-grown human brain inside his skull. He’s also rude, crude, irreverent, and becomes Gunnar’s best friend.
After the war, Max and Gunnar become roomies while Gunnar runs GDM Facilitators, a mostly-legitimate freelance tour service, and things are going pretty well, until he’s hired by Natasha Kartseva. Before she can tell him where she wants to go, Natasha is killed and Gunnar is arrested for the crime, and before he knows it, he and Max are up to their necks in government-types with deadly weapons, college girls, artificially-created humans, and a mad genius who’s intent on creating the perfect society even if he has to kill everyone to do it.
Chief among the two fugitives’ allies are Samantha Jeffries, the college girl who rescues Max because he’s such a “dear little kitty”; Galina Kartseva, found living in the abandoned laboratory where she and Max were created and whom Max considers his sister, and Rikki, an experimnent which went more than awry. Chief among their pursuers is Iosef Ivanovich Kartsev, last surviving member of the TransHuman Alliance, a war criminal escaping execution by faking his own death, closely followed by various members of two unknown Factions, one wanting Max alive, the other equally wanting him dead, and sprinkled through are assorted cops, criminals, and other denizens of the planets of the Belt, that region of space where Gunnar plies his occasionally-nefarious trade.
Calling on help from friends who also tread the thin line between law-abiding and not, Max, Gunnar, and Samantha sort out various clues and delve into Max’s pre-Gunnar memories, and what they find there takes them on a jaunt to the laboratory where the feline had his beginning. There, they find Galina, a Scripture quoting babe who converted herself to Christianity, and the ever-changing Rikki. Now, it’s just a shove, stumble, and a short free-fall from one place of confinement to another until they come face-to-face with the man who started it all, Dr. Kartsev himself. And now that he has all his surviving “children” together again, he’s ready to unveil the final phase of his Master Plan. He doesn’t count on the the resourcefulness of our heroes, or the contrariness of his human brain computer, however…
MY OPINION: This is the way I like ‘em: Slam-bang action, snappy dialogue, and irreverence. Reminiscent of an R-rated Cat from Outer Space, Max and Me is a rowdy romp of a sci-fi adventure. If my cat could’ve had the power of speech, I’d have wanted him to be as verbally creative as Max. The ending is in the same vein: abrupt and laugh-inducing.
Dare I hope there are more adventures for Max and Gunnar in the offing?
This novel was supplied by the author and no remuneration was involved in the writing of the review.
