Spares - Hardcover

Smith, Michael Marshall

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 055310604X ISBN 13: 9780553106046

Publisher: Bantam, 1997

Synopsis

Suppose for a moment you're Jack Randall.  You're a loner, an ex-cop, the dangerous veteran of a savage war.  All you've held dear has long ago been destroyed.  For the last five years you've been hiding out on a spares farm, working at the only job that will still have you: guarding people who have never seen the outside world and can't even spell the word "escape." In short, your luck has run out.

You might think things couldn't get any worse.  You'd be wrong.  Because Jack Randall has a talent for attracting trouble: the kind most people run screaming
from.  But Jack Randall is not most people.  That's part of his trouble.  Now he's on the run with seven of the Farm's inmates (well, six and a half), and the people who own them will do anything to get them back.  All Jack wants to do is score enough money to disappear with his human contraband.  But things aren't as simple as that.  For Jack Randall, they never are.

Jack is on a head-on collision course with the man responsible for all this misery--a cold-blooded killer with one purpose: to cancel Jack once and for all.

Now Jack has a decision to make: keep running or even the score?  Either way spells more trouble.  And when the ghosts of the past meet the terrors of the future, the result for Jack will be one hell of a scary ride.

Who are the spares?  And what is their purpose?  That is the most shocking revelation of all.

About this title

Review:

Imagine a future--next year, perhaps?--in which the wealthy clone themselves at birth to provide spare parts for their bodies as they become needed. Drop into that scenario a tough but compassionate ex-cop who decides to liberate seven "spares" from the farm where they're being kept until needed, and you've got a lively, very moving combination of genres that has already been bought for the big screen.

From the Publisher:

"Shocking, moving and surreal."
--Clive Barker

"Coma meets Blade Runner in this future noir thriller, a compulsively readable melding of hardboiled narrative and hardware invention."
--Publisher's Weekly

"If a novel was ever destined to follow Ridley Scott's classic filming of Philip K. Dick's Blade Runner, this is it. Newcomer Smith has originality plus a wicked flow of philosophic twists."
--Kirkus Reviews

About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 055310604X
• ISBN 13: 9780553106046
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336