Born to Run, by Stephen Kenson. I used to adore the Shadowrun shared setting. It was gritty, noir, always original, sexy, brutal, and made for interesting exploration of issues of the darker sides of morality and character. But then the parent company that produced the game based in the setting went defunct, and they stopped publishing the novels. I picked up this novel with wary high hopes, noticing that they seemed to be bringing the shared setting back...and was unfortunately quite disappointed. Granted, I guess this might be a kind of introductory book to the setting, but even in that it would be a weak one. Any exploration of issues is shallow at best, there is little if any development of characters more rooted in real life slang and manner than in that of the setting, and the whole thing seemed better suited to a short story. Nope, does not match at all up to the old school days; thankfully, there are still used bookstores out there that usually have a few of the original Shadowrun novels in stock.

Tangentially, take almost everything in there and apply it to what happened when (with the same parent company, of course) the wonderfully epic and rich Battletech shared setting was watered down and defiled into "Mechwarrior" and then even more ungodly worse, "Mechwarrior: the Dark Ages" or whatever it is. I won't even deign to italicize those blasphemies. Ugh.