Publishers Weekly
07/09/2018
Mitchell (Midnight City) packs this feisty page-turner with a great cast and plenty of twists. Marcus Flynn, an engineer at tech company Maas-Dorian, is framed for murder and sentenced to life on the Razor, a maximum-security prison planet rich in the powerful fuel source xytrilium. Flynn barely survives his first days of incarceration, and then the Razor becomes catastrophically unstable. Prison personnel abandon the dying planet, leaving all the convicts behind. But Flynn is offered a way out: if he can retrieve highly restricted xytrilium data from a quarantined research lab, he’ll be rescued. As he fights his way to the lab, Flynn accumulates a band of inmate misfits, including Key, a pugnacious prison-smart Latina, and Zane, a hulking bioaugmented killer with unfinished business on the imploding planet. To top it all off, there’s a vicious insectoid alien on the prowl. The further Flynn ventures across the Razor’s inhospitable terrain, the more everything—the impending apocalypse, the creatures, the superpowered prisoners, and even Maas-Dorian—appears to be connected. A few too many characters and subplots make the story feel crowded, but sequels may give them somewhere to go. Fans of space adventure will relish this entertaining escapade. (Nov.)
From the Publisher
"If Quentin Tarantino and James Cameron had co-directed The Shawshank Redemption, it would look like The Razor." —David Gill, author of Black Hole Sun
"J. Barton Mitchell's The Razor is cutting-edge SF." —Matthew Costello, author of Star Road, Doom 3, and Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier
Kirkus Reviews
2018-09-02
A mysterious catastrophe threatens a previously impregnable and dangerously corrupt 22nd-century prison planet.
A motley group of familiar prison-drama archetypes face life imprisonment on the brutal mining colony known as the Razor, so called because only a sliver of the planet is habitable, balanced on either side by extreme environments. The characters include Marcus Flynn, a brilliant engineer whose employers framed him for murder when he decided to go into business for himself; James Maddox, who was a former elite military officer stationed at the Razor until he killed his commanding officer because of the man's ties to human trafficking; Key, a street-smart failed gang leader who can't help caring; Raelyn, a doctor who lost her license after conducting a dangerous experiment on herself; and Zane, a tough former operative augmented by the government to have control over metal. But most of them have barely arrived on the planet when alarms blare and all the guards evacuate, leaving our heroes to battle their way through violent gangs of inmates and struggle across the hazardous landscape in search of answers, which lead them to an escaped swarm of murderous aliens and an imprisoned psychopathic scientist. As the aliens begin to breed and the livable part of the planet rapidly shrinks, can the group make it to the starport and escape before it's too late? The author leans heavily on both action and prison tropes, with a hefty dose of horror borrowed from the Alien films, but those tropes endure because they're still crowd-pleasing and effective. While there is a certain amount of resolution, there's enough open-endedness to surmise that this is the first of a series, with many more revelations to come.
An R-rated popcorn-munching entertainment in the best B-movie tradition.
