Review: The Mostly Forgotten Spy

The Mostly Forgotten Spy by David Harkonson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Mostly forgettable.

It's a supers story in a world where about 60% of people have powers of some sort, mainly fairly useless ones. The main character is tasked with infiltrating a supervillain group by what turns out to be a tragicomically inept superhero support organization, but rather than getting one appropriate to her beginner status, she instead gets swept up in events and ends up in a group which is well above her abilities. Or is it? She manages to muddle through, using her ability to make people forget her, along with bluff, good luck, determination and the help of friends she meets along the way.

The prose is often ponderous, as are the attempts at humour, and the humour tends to be dark - casual violence played for laughs. The characters are thin and generic. At times, there's a conceit that it's being written by someone in the setting, but that comes and goes and is eventually no longer mentioned. It does get a couple of good wordplays off.

I had a pre-publication version from Netgalley, which asks me to believe that the "minor typographic errors" in it will be corrected before publication. I didn't spot many typos, apart from inconsistent name spelling, but I did see instances of several common issues - incorrect dialog punctuation, dangling modifiers, unclear pronoun references, "may" in past tense instead of "might," missing past perfect tense, a couple of homonyms - though none in large numbers. I'm skeptical that they'll all be corrected before publication, but I could be wrong. To be clear, this is a lot better than most superhero novels, which for some reason rank alongside LitRPG and steampunk as most likely to have awful copy editing.

I didn't ever come to love it, but I didn't hate it. It was just OK. Someone for whom the humour was a better fit would probably enjoy it more.

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