Chasing Filthy Lucre by Jarrett Rush

Dirty, edgy, and lots of action!

In a grim future America, one company, RomaCorp, provides all goods and services to the city of New Eden. The city had become what it was after a bunch of young idealists had taken over the in-situ government with theories that sounded good on paper but, in practice, failed after a mere eighteen months. The leaders of New Eden had come on television one day and said everyone was just “on their own.” Now the population of the city was scraping by in a dirty existence to fund their next hookup to “the wire.”

Weber Rexall had been a soldier and then a cop when the collapse happened. Now he eked out a living doing exhibition fights where sometimes he played the part of the winner, sometimes the loser. Tonight he’s paired against Johnny “The Kid” Berger, and is scheduled to be the victor.

Between his appearances in Raul’s basement fight ring, Rexall sidelines as a bodyguard for a data runner named Carroll. Carroll’s shop downloads critical or sensitive data into human data runners, and Rexall escorts them to the recipient of the data where it is uploaded and removed from the human carrier, a financially beneficial exchange for both the runner and the escort.

Rexall, impressed with Berger’s skills, includes him in this lucrative endeavor, but their very first job doesn’t go well, leaving the data runner dead, Carroll near death, and his shop destroyed by RomaCorp. With the help of a Serve-O named Simmer Jones, Rexall and Berger set out to make things right. Or at least as right as they can.

Clocking in at a little over 100 pages, Jarrett Rush packs a lot of awesomeness into Chasing Filthy Lucre, this first story in the New Eden series. I loved the noir styling, the dark, itchy setting, and the characters that combine to tell a really good story. This is recommended for readers that like dystopian, urban storylines with all the grit and dirt and unsettling edginess.