Krazykiwi @ Kiwitopia

Not bad.

Great strong female lead character, Parish Plessis, who isn't amazingly gorgeous but rather is a 6 foot plus tall bruiser of a bodyguard/muscle for hire/bounty hunter in the slums of a future Australian megacity. The world is wonderful, the castaways of a future suburbia, living on a poisoned earth over a monster landfill, the Tert - a place full of feral children, half dingo boys, drug addicts and shamans,  This is a world where reality tv robot cameras have risen above the law, genetic modification is the norm and suburban housewives are addicted to the point of catatonia on neuro-stimulating "Romance". 

So, Parish ran away from the shining suburbs to the Tert to escape a brute of a stepfather, but accidentally got herself "owned" by a gang lord. She still takes jobs on the side, and when she gets a tip on a job protecting a suspect in a crime she sees a way out of her gang bondage, and into a bigger, better gang, one even her boss is scared of.

Although it's clearly left as a possible open to a series, most of the actual plot of this book is wrapped up - but not all of it. There's just too many dropped threads, and that's why I can't bring myself to rate it higher than "I liked it." 

The plot is very convoluted and confusing, with multiple interconnected sub plots. Put it this way: You could get an entire 26 episode tv season out of this book easily, and barely have to cut a thing - you definitely wouldn't have to add any plots. It gets very confusing keeping track of characters, and a few I'd like to find out what happened to them - the feral girl with no arms, who may or may not have been rescued, the former superathlete who had been experimented on.

Other reviewers have had trouble with the slang, but I found it fairly easy to read on that point my being from NZ and fairly familiar with AUS slang already maybe a lot of the difficulty slid right by me.  But the plot convolutions and the enormous array of characters that come and go and then come back and then go (not to mention the occasional shapeshifter who looks like someone else entirely), I kept finding myself having to read back a page or two to figure out what was going on. 

I could really dig watching this as a tv series though (not a movie, you wouldn't fit a fraction of it into a movie.) And I'll probably read the next in the series.