The novel opens with a generic scuffle in a dive on the "East Side of Old New York," where some lowlifes are trying to shake him down for not killing someone as contracted—mostly because "there was a child in the room." Cates overcomes the opposition, while also eluding Monks and System Security Force (SSF) personnel (otherwise known as "System Pigs," or just "the police"). But it's just not his day, or week, or year. The Monks follow him and his friend Nad Muller to a "semi-legal" bar, Pickering's. NAD gets killed—or you could say he gets "overly proselytized"—and Cates is fleeing again, escaping more Monks and cops. This time, Cates goes to Kev Gatz, a guy Catz once tried to shake down. Gatz has forbidden psionic ability and can get Cates out of the city by bending minds to his will.

However, before Cates can get far, two System Pigs question him about the death of an officer. Gatz saves Cates by controlling the Pigs, but one of them escapes. Cates seemingly can't catch a break—until Dick Marin, director of SSF Internal Affairs, hauls him in for questioning. Marion wants to hire Cates to infiltrate the world's fastest-growing religion—the cyborgs' Electric Church—and investigate its founder, Dennis Squalor. In return, Marin will clear Cates of any role in the murder of several dead cops and give Cates a pile of money. Why? Marion tells Cates, "I believe that inside most of those Monks is a horrified, tortured human mind that is used like a puppet."

The plot gets ever more convoluted as Cates assembles a team, acquires and retools a Monk named Kenneth West and negotiates a minefield of double deals, insane cyborgs and unscrupulous humans. Will Cates survive all of this? Will the reader?

Action undercut by uneven writing

There's certainly no shortage of action in The Electric Church, although much of it is clumsy and goes on too long, just as there's no shortage of twists and complications. If you don't think about Cates that much—especially his role as a hired killer who is just nice enough not to eliminate you if you hold a puppy or baby in front of you—then the novel will give you a few thrills. Because the violence is cartoonish, nothing has any weight, even death, and any moral or ethical qualms are superfluous.

So far, so average. But where the novel really falls down on the job is in its inability to show us the future it purportedly inhabits. There's hardly a lick of description in The Electric Church, not even of characters. The hurly-burly's all in the constant forward progress or explanation. I'm a huge fan of noir fiction and generally love this kind of cross-genre novel that mixes noir with other elements. However, even the most laconic noir novel (Ken Bruen's books come to mind) gives you a sense of place. That atmosphere contributes heavily to the reality of what you're reading. The result, in Jeff Somers' prose, of being unable to see anything, even the insides of bars, is that the action scenes blur into one another and the plot twists begin to seem like stops on the world's longest, most boring roller coaster. Another effect created by the generic backdrop is that the sole point of interest in The Electric Church is Cates' attitude and nervous energy. Since Cates also has no background or depth, your satisfaction will hinge on how far you're willing to let that attitude take you. (Contrast the lack of detail in Somers' prose to Richard Morgan's masterful noir SF novel Altered Carbon, for example—or, in the absurdist tradition that The Electric Church sometimes traffics, Douglas Adams' early novels.)

The Electric Church feels a bit like a fourth-generation photocopy from a dream of Blade Runner combined with the Cliffs Notes from any number of both gonzo and serious noir mystery thrillers, all of that then mixed with fading memories of a hardboiled comic book or two. As a quick, disposable read you could, I suppose, do worse than The Electric Church, but you could also do light-years better.