Made to Kill, the first in the planned L.A. Trilogy from Adam Christopher (Empire State; The Burning Dark), is set in 1960s Los Angeles. The city of Christopher's imagination is the L.A. of history, with one noticeable difference: Raymond Electromatic, the world's only robot detective and last functioning robot to survive the collapse of the robot boom 10 years prior. Ray was programmed to solve crimes, while the computer system that he was paired with (named Ada) was instructed to make money doing so. But as Made to Kill opens, Ada has turned her programming--and Raymond's--to new operations, making Raymond the world's only robot detective and the world's only robot assassin.
When a girl wanders into the office looking for someone both to find a missing person and summarily kill that person, it seems like the perfect job for Ray and Ada. But the more Ray discovers about the assignment--the actor he's been assigned to find and kill, the ways Ada manipulates his programming, the political forces at play in the city--the more the job feels like a set-up. And perhaps it is.
Christopher notes that he was inspired to write this novel when considering what it might be like to read an unknown science-fiction epic from Raymond Chandler, and that inspiration shows. Made to Kill evolves over the course of the story from science fiction to a noir-style mystery and back again, never missing a beat in the process. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm