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TEKWAR by William Shatner

TEKWAR

By

Pub Date: Oct. 2nd, 1989
Publisher: Putnam

Futuristic thriller with a sense of humor, from Star Trek's Captain Kirk: Shatner's well-handled debut. In the 22nd century, tough ex-cop Jake Cardigan--framed for dealing Tek, computer chips that offer addictive brain-destroying fantasies--wakes after serving four years of his fifteen-years-in-a-coma sentence. His wife and son have left him, but Jake's former partner, Sid Gomez, has a commission to locate Dr. Kittridge, rumored to have invented an anti-Tek device, and now mysteriously vanished after supposedly crashing in the jungles of Mexico. Soon, Gomez is injured holding off a robot assassin, but Jake heads for Mexico despite the warnings of government agent Kurt Winterguild. Jake meets up with an android duplicate of Kittridge's beautiful daughter Beth; she suspects that her father is planning to sell out to shady businessman Bennet Sands (he's now involved with Jake's ex-wife) and Teklord Sonny Hokori (probably the man who framed Jake). Finally, android Beth saves Jake from another android-assassin (this time a copy of Jake's son), Sands is arrested, Hokori dies in a hail of bullets provided by Winterguild, and Jake--having fallen in love with the android Beth--gets to meet the real Beth. A brisk, often wryly amusing narrative, with lots of futuristic hardware and no claim to originality: a quite creditable debut.