Review: Out Like a Light

Out Like a Light by Mark Phillips
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The second in the Psi-Power trilogy, featuring hapless FBI agent Ken Malone. This one makes more of the then-futuristic setting of 1974 than the first one, with various ingenious bits of technology on show besides the videophones from the previous book, and it expands on the psychic powers, introducing two new ones.

(view spoiler)[It turns out that Malone isn't just "lucky," he has precognition, which is why he ends up in the right place at the right time to make progress on his case - a convenient plot device that also makes sense in the setting, so I'll allow it. The other power introduced, and the focus of the book, is teleportation. I noticed that Malone believes near the end that he's (probably) telepathic, something the authors backed off from in the third book - which I've already read, out of sequence; he didn't believe he was telepathic at the start of that story. (hide spoiler)]

There's a dropped notebook which provides important clues (Malone really is lucky as well), and what's written on which pages of the notebook changes each time it's mentioned; these are continuity errors rather than another speculative element, but that's a minor annoyance. As with the other books in the trilogy, there's an apparently insoluble bizarre problem which Malone chips determinedly, if sometimes hopelessly, away at and eventually figures out, along the way encountering some colourful minor characters, dropping a few beautifully constructed metaphors couched in hilarious sentences, getting involved in several well-described action sequences (in this case, mostly also slapstick), and meeting a lovely woman who has more to her than meets the eye. It's in the true noir tradition, but with layers of SF and comedy, both of which, for me, worked well.

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