The Punch Escrow Review
Title: The Punch Escrow
Author: Tal Klien
Date Purchased: 8/31/2018
Price Paid: $2.11
Date Finished: 7/22/2021
Rating: 4.5/5
Wow. Lots of science fiction lately. So much so that I just checked to see when the next fantasy novel pops up. I guess I was better about reading the fantasy I purchased than the science fiction. I mean. I wasn’t good about reading any of it, but the list is currently heavy towards the sci-fi end of the spectrum.
I’m going to put it right out on Front Street: I really enjoyed this book. A lot. But now that I’m sitting to write about it, I’m wondering how much of my enjoyment of this book was skewed by the preceding book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. I went from old stuffy sci-fi to new fangled flashy sci-fi.
The Punch Escrow was recommend to me by a friend, and while I never know what I’m going to get with a book that someone else liked, I was willing to give it a shot. And I’m glad I did.
Unfortunately, there’s a lot about this book that I can’t discuss without really spoiling a bunch of the plot, so I’m going to speak in very vague terms about things. But we’ve been down this road before, and I’m hopeful that someone will read this review, go read the book, and then return to either agree with my assessment…or call me a jackass. I’m really okay with either.
The book is set in the year 2147, and along with a lot of marvelous advancements in most areas of life we have developed the ability to teleport. The protagonist is named Joel Byram, and he works as a freelancer that helps make AI smarter by routinely tricking them…and then explaining what the trick was. He and his wife Sylvia live in New York City where she is a physicist for International Transport, the company that controls the teleporting services.
Joel, as a character, is kind of an ass. I know this is a bit of a trope, but we do see some character development from him throughout the book. He starts to see how he has treated others and gains a unique perspective on how other people view him as a person. He certainly makes for an interesting character.
The plot moves at the speed of a bullet train, and if “sci-fi thriller” is an actual sub-genre I would like to sign up for a newsletter to find more books that are paced in this way. My first day of reading saw a third of this book go rushing by. I mean, I was on an airplane, but still. To me this fit the definition of a page-turner.
What was most interesting to me was that we have several antagonists in this book, each one motivated by a different aspect of the…problem. (Again, sorry. Trying to vague here.) Frequently I’ll find some antagonists to be paper thin and unbelievable, but these were all pretty much on target with what you would expect from the story.
My only gripe about this book was the use of footnotes. Towards the early parts of the book there are footnotes two to three times a chapter – and lengthy ones at that. I have a general disdain for a footnote outside of a reference text because it tends to break the flow of the narrative. I can understand why Klein used them for expositional purposes, but they were fairly lengthy and tension breaking.
At the end of the day, that wasn’t enough to stop me from really liking this book, and I would strongly recommend it to anyone who is looking for a sci-fi thriller!
Final Thoughts: A great beach read, and one that I’d happily recommend. If not for the footnotes this might have gotten a five start rating!