Book of the Day

From the review

Scion opens with Azure losing a fistfight to something that used to be a person. The thing across from him has been grown and grafted into a wall of engineered muscle, and Azure, heavily modified himself, has to work out mid-swing which of his own upgrades can take another hit and which will quit on him first. Islington offers no orientation. You learn this world the way Azure's body does, by finding where the limits are, and by the time the fight ends you know more about how money and flesh trade places here than a prologue could have told you. The rule at the center is a nasty one. The very rich have bought their way out of dying, and the only brake left is people like Azure, licensed to kill them. He does it for a paycheck because he's buried in debt like everyone else below the lifer line, which gives every joke he makes a sour aftertaste. Then a contract lands that runs backward: protect a lifer. The job pairs him with an older woman who refuses to be impressed by him, and their bickering is the best thing in the book. Each of his sarcastic asides gets returned with interest, and under the banter Islington keeps pressing on the real question, what a life is worth once some people can buy more of it.