Strange Robby
Selina Rosen
Meisha Merlin, August 2006
ISBN 1-592-22046-0
Review by Melanie Fletcher.
Strange Robby is one of the brave new breed of cross-genre novels, a nifty mix of John Varley SF and Joseph Wambaugh police procedural with a liberal lacing of black humor. In her first hardcover novel, Selina Rosen presents an unusual but very effective cop team -- Iraq War vet and chronic troublemaker "Spider" Webb, and her stalwart partner, straight man and jujitsu instructor Tommy Chen. Fed up with the inadequacies of the justice system, Webb and Chen are secretly cheering on a mysterious serial killer who is microwaving the brains of local psychopaths, an act that gains him the nickname, "The Fry Guy." As the body count goes up, however, Webb and Chen are soon caught between the Fry Guy and a covert government agency determined to capture him. To make matters worse, Webb finds herself targeted by the agency when she discovers a horrifying secret about her past, a secret that may link her to the Fry Guy.
Selina Rosen has been a superb storyteller for years, covering a wide spectrum of topics; her Chains trilogy (Chains of Freedom, Chains of Destruction, and Chains of Redemption) is Asimovian in its examination of the rise and fall of governments, and her Drewcila Qwah, Salvage Queen novels (Queen of Denial and Recycled) are hilarious space opera. With Strange Robby, she stays closer to home, exploring the themes of individuality and personal autonomy in the face of an ever-encroaching government, while maintaining a plot reminiscent of the best of The X-Files. Like Mulder and Scully, Webb and Chan are forced to work outside their own system when they realize that the Fry Guy's abnormal killing ability and the government's Strange Weapon Task Force are somehow connected. To complicate matters, Webb knows more about the Fry Guy than she's willing to admit, attempting to protect both Chen and Webb's new girlfriend Assistant DA Carrie Long with her silence.
The SWTF kidnap Webb in an attempt to learn the true identity of the Fry Guy; their torture sessions trigger memories of abuse in a Iraqi camp and, even more disturbingly, elusive hints of a childhood involving mysterious medical exams and a faceless woman trying to protect her. Meanwhile, Chen and Carrie try to locate the covert agency with the help of a murdered FBI agent's final act: a disc of stolen SWTF records. To their shock, the information on the disc stretches back to Nazi Germany and Roswell, New Mexico, explaining certain anomalies about the Fry Guy, Webb...and Webb's children.
With Chen and Carrie still in the dark, the only person who can help Webb is Robby Strange, aka the Fry Guy. Having followed the detective when she was kidnapped, it's up to Robbie, a gentle TV repairman with a deadly power, to find a way into the SWTF compound and rescue Webb and a young boy named Mark before it's too late.
Following in the footsteps of writers such as Octavia E. Butler and Alyx Dellamonica, Rosen brings some of her own background to Strange Robby, neatly sidestepping the stereotypical SF straight white male hero; Spider is gay, Tommy is Asian, and other major characters are black and Latino. The variety of skin tones and gender preferences isn't played as some sort of knee-jerk nod to political correctness; this is simply the way Rosen's world is created, and the characters behave and interact in a refreshingly organic manner.
Rosen also addresses the slow corruption of the modern legal system with Webb and Chen's desire to protect the Fry Guy, despite pressure from their own department to locate and arrest him. Robby isn't the garden-variety psychopath, for one thing; he can see into people's souls, and only executes the "dark" individuals who enjoy causing pain and suffering. It's easy enough to debate whether or not Robby's form of social control is the right thing to do; technically he would be classified as a murderer, but Robby's type of vigilantism would most likely be cheered on by people who have been personally affected by pedophiles, rapists or murderers.
All in all, readers who like a good, solid SF thriller with some thought-provoking social commentary should enjoy the adventures of Webb and Chen. With any luck, this won't be the only story about Shea City's finest.
