Reading for Pleasure Wednesday

First, off, if you're not yet aware of RfP Wednesdays, the rules are at Dr Crazy's.

The book I finished most recently is Chimera, by Will Shetterly. Just something I picked up while browsing in my local public library branch. I'm sort of in a lull between hold requests at the library, so I was just picking up a couple of things to tide me over.

This isn't brilliant or innovative SF, but it was a fun and engaging read. It's a hard-boiled detective novel set in a future LA run by Libertarians. The down-on-his-luck detective, Chase Maxwell, gets hired by a mysterious woman...who actually is a jaguar chimera, a human-animal blend, created by gene splicing science. The murder/investigation plot includes all that you'd expect from that genre, but set in a futuristic world with its own set of problems. Chimera rights, AI rights, poverty, workcamps...the setting is ethically and scientifically interesting, and the novel really grew on me as I read it. A quick, quirky read, very self-conscious without being pretentious about the various narrative subgenres it mashes together.