Because this is, one way or another, Isako's story. We can feel her past in the way she moves, each survived engagement leaving a mark, each cut from her blade backed by years of fights just like the one that you're currently losing. Because Isako is a killer, and Isako is also the best at what she does. Now, having said that, Isako isn't just a killer. She's a wartime concierge, someone who can commit a bit of light corporate espionage before lunch, and read off discrepancies in the opposition's P&L reports with one hand while dealing with an assassin with the other. But she's also a woman with a lot of old friends in interesting places, someone who has made connections wherever she's gone, and has, somewhere in there, built a family, a family which isn't just blood and bone, but shared truth and shared horror and shared love. Isako is getting a little tired, and she has quite a bit to lose, but she's not out just yet. Which is just as well, because her brand of weary, slightly cynical, backed by genuine emotional weight for her friends and family...makes her the kind of protagonist who strides confidently off the page, smacks you upside the head and tells you to keep reading, because she's not dead yet.I'm always a bit reluctant to use the word, but as a protagonist, Isako is fierce. She gives approximately zero fucks, and, given a mission she cares about, is an undeniable force of nature.
Mind you, there's some other stuff on the page here. It's not all Isako doing backflips, complaining how much they hurt, then sinking a short-blade into the neck of some mook. It's that, oh absolutely, but not just that. We can see how she struggles to connect with a daughter lost to her through time and the vagaries of work, estranged through chance more than outright neglect, we ca see how her friends are...well, they're hired guns as well, with a gendas of their own, and how those agendas make everyone involved step carefully around each other while they try to find a way through, off the back of older, bloodier, simpler times.
Isako is the heart of this story, that's a fact - but the supporting cast of professional "Contractors". limpidly malevolent corporate aristocrats and scrabbling underclass...they give Isako the heart of her own that makes the story work.
And the story works because Isako's world is very odd indeed. An airless rock, slooooowly being reclaimed by terraforming. A population living under domes, walking out into the uncovered desolation when they can't bring in resources any more, hoping for a better world centuries down the line. Corporate departments trying to shape a planet, city districts controlled by the departments that employ them divergences in direction by vice presidents backed by blades and knives in the dark. It's a dystopia, yes, but a frighteningly plausible one, where most people don't even know what they're missing, or might think it's worth it. This is a company town, fallen into navel gazing whilst heavily armed. Where employment guarantees resources, and where the social safety-net...really isn't. This is Isako's world, where the bosses run things more literally than ever, and where everything may be about to change.
That#s...well, no spoilers here. But the paradigm on which this place is built, absolute corporate sovereignty traded for the chance one day at a better world...may be out of date. There's rebels, of course, but that's not all that's going on, not all that Isako will have to investigate, while she tries to work out who knows what, and what they want to do with the information. Whether the old order is worth preserving, and if she's willing to be the one to do it. Because this is a thriller, a conspiracy of moving parts and silent pawns and quiet people in back rooms making deals that they sign in someone else's blood.
The Last Contract of Isako is beautiful and brutal and bloody. It's heartfelt and messy and thoughtful, a story of kindness and killers, and a story of how far people are willing to go for the truth, or for the lies wrapped around it.
It's a fun book, an emotional book, a book that sneaks off the page like a stiletto, that will leave you feeling, one way or the other. It is, basically, a damn fine story.
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