Grimlock ♥ Ultra Magnus

I love this book.   It's a short prequel to the novels, and I read it after I devoured the first two Richards and Klein novels.   It's an amazingly rich future in which AIs have full human rights as the UN found them to be sentient.   Which makes me so, so happy, so in addition to clever writing and laugh out loud moments, I have the whole 'AIs roaming freely.'   (There's more to this.   Richards is a Five, and many of them went insane or committed suicide.   This book gives a little more background as to why that didn't happen to Richards.  Of course, I don't know how many of my readers are that interested in the whole complexity of the AIs and the AI systems and how near-Is differ from Fives, differ from Sixes and Sevens so I won't bore you with my whole spiel about that.   I'll just say there's a lot of happiness on my part and there are logistical reasons for the Fives to be more interesting and rich characters.)

This is short mystery that is a stand alone, although it's also a lovely character study of, well, mostly Richards.   While I love Klein's cybernetic bits, Richards is my main interest in these stories, so this also explains why this appeals so much to me.  

Then there were errors like this: "'I need not tell you that, although you are under arrest, you are perilously close.'"   My confusion stemmed from them stating that Richards was not under arrest yet, so I went, wait, what?   And then realized that a 'not' was missing: '...although you are not under arrest, you are perilously close.'    It's the only way the sentence makes sense.   There were a multitude of such errors.   I believe that this was simply errors in scanning or simply awful editing/proofreading.   The author is quite talented, and the novels themselves were superb.   Use of language, and so on.   This was free, but my pleasure was dimmed quite a bit having to stop and make sense of sentences, thus the three and a half star rating.   Yes, this is still a favorite book due to content, but I knock off stars for horrid editing.   It does this author a great, great disservice and is a shame that such a wonderful story is ruined by this lack of care.

Also, if you care a great deal for your AI there are a lot of threats, including lobotomizing one and killing them.   I knew that this was a prequel so that Richards had to be alive for the next two books, but still?   The humans threat to effectively lobotomize him enraged me, especially since there are laws protecting AI in this universe.   I hope Richards' lawyer, who was present for so many of the threats, tears everyone there a new one in court. 

Sadness.   One more half or a short story then no more new Richards and Klein for me!   I'm already considering book hopping to savor this last bit that I have.