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    Made to Kill: A Ray Electromatic Mystery
    Made to Kill: A Ray Electromatic Mystery
    Made to Kill: A Ray Electromatic Mystery
    Audiobook6 hours

    Made to Kill: A Ray Electromatic Mystery

    Written by Adam Christopher

    Narrated by Dan Bittner

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    It was just another Tuesday morning when she walked into the office--young, as I suspected they all might be, another dark brunette with some assistance and enough eye black to match up to Cleopatra. And who am I? I'm Ray, the world's last robot, famed and feared in equal measure, which suits me just fine--after all, the last place you'd expect to find Hollywood's best hit man is in the plain light of day.

    Raymond Electromatic is good at his job, as good as he ever was at being a true Private Investigator, the lone employee of the Electromatic Detective Agency--except for Ada, office gal and super-computer, the constant voice in Ray's inner ear. Ray might have taken up a new line of work, but money is money, after all, and he was programmed to make a profit. Besides, with his twenty-four-hour memory-tape limits, he sure can keep a secret.

    When a familiar-looking woman arrives at the agency wanting to hire Ray to find a missing movie star, he's inclined to tell her to take a hike. But she had the cold hard cash, a demand for total anonymity, and tendency to vanish on her own.

    Plunged into a glittering world of fame, fortune, and secrecy, Ray uncovers a sinister plot that goes much deeper than the silver screen--and this robot is at the wrong place, at the wrong time.

    Made to Kill is the thrilling new speculative noir from novelist and comic writer Adam Christopher.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Audio
    Release dateNov 3, 2015
    ISBN9781427264886
    Made to Kill: A Ray Electromatic Mystery
    Author

    Adam Christopher

    Adam Christopher was born in Auckland, New Zealand. In 2006, he moved to the sunny North West of England, where he lives in domestic bliss with wife and cat in a house next to a canal. Adam's short fiction has appeared in Pantechnicon, Hub, and Dark Fiction Magazine. When not writing Adam can be found drinking tea and obsessing over Dark Shadows, DC Comics, and 1960s Doctor Who. Adam is also very bad at épée but knows that Thibault cancels out Capa Ferro, unless the enemy has studied his Agrippa. Which he has.

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    Reviews for Made to Kill

    3.5/5

    63 ratings10 reviews

    What did you think?

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    • 3/5
      If you are a Raymond Chandler fan, you will dig this book.It's straight forward hardboiled detective fiction set in 1940's Hollywood. Straight forward except for the fact that the detective is the world's last robot.I think sci-fi folks won't appreciate this book as much as mystery fans will, but it was fun. Lots of classic Hollywood stylings, Communist plots, missing people, gold and murder.A wonderful read for a long Saturday night while winter swirls around outside.
    • 5/5
      This is a very enjoyable book. I'm looking forward to more books with this character if more ever get made. The story is easy to follow. The book is easy to read. The writer kept the pace at a good rate. The setting of the story actually works when you accept it as an alternate timeline. Its so good that I found myself reading it so quickly that I had to slow down. I wanted to stay in the world that these characters lived in for a little longer. I want to read more books from this author now. I will recommend this to anyone who just wants to read a well crafted story.

      I read this book through NetGalley. I thank them for this book. #NetGalley
    • 3/5
      The cover art is A , the plot is decent (in an over-the-top diabolical Red Scare SciFi way), and the noir vibe is spot-on...but I feel the robot conceit needed some work, along with a little more worldbuilding.
    • 3/5
      Made To Kill is a 50's noir detective novel where the hero is an self-aware robot with an AI computer as secretary/handler/overseer and long-term memory. Because Ray Electromatic can only remember as much as he can store on 24 hours worth of tape. So he relies on Ada the super-computer and office "gal" to remember for him, keep his appointment books, and tell him who he is. Nothing in the story bears thinking about too hard or it will fall apart like the thing veneer of stage dressing that it is.Ray and Ada are the one-and-only creation of a dead robotics/computer genius. There are spies and counter spies and murder and Hollywood intrigue. Unfortunately none of it is really that new or interesting once you get past the robot-is-the-detective shtick. I finished it. I didn't hate it. I probably won't bother with the rest of the series.
    • 4/5
      Made to Kill by Adam Christopher is part of the Ray Electromatic Mysteries, but I am not certain what order the books follow. It's about Ray Electromatic and his business of killer for hire in disguise of a private detective company.I absolutely loved this book! It reminded me of the '50s B rated sci-fi movies. This book brought back a lot of childhood memories of my mom and me watching B movies until all hours of the night.This story has great characters and wonderful story telling. I can't wait to read more of the Ray Electromatic Mysteries.I won this copy in a giveaway and all opinions are my own.
    • 3/5
      Billed as a homage to Raymond Chandler but in a science fiction genre I thought this would be just the thing to read in the long summer days. It certainly wasn't deep literature but I just found it silly. Maybe you have to be more of a Chandler fan than I am to appreciate this; the only Chandler I have read recently was The Long Goodbye and I didn't like it very much either.Raymond Electromatic is the last robot on earth. His counterpart, a supercomputer called Ada, runs the detective agency where they work. Their creator gave Ada a primary imperative to make money. Ada analyzed the business and decided they could make more money if they diversified a little. So, Raymond is called a private detective but he is really a paid assassin. Raymond's memory is wiped every night so he doesn't remember the specifics of the kills but, like with any computer, not everything is erased and he was getting flashbacks so Ada had to come clean. Since Raymond is a robot he doesn't feel any guilt about his profession but he does wonder if there might be another way to make a living. (Question: just how much money do a robot and a computer need anyway?) Into their office walks a Hollywood actress who needs Raymond to find a colleague and then kill him. She pays up front with a bag full of gold ingots. Then the story just gets silly with Russian spies and switched identities and radioactive cubes all taking place in Hollywood in the 1950s. It's a good thing this was a short book.
    • 4/5
      I liked this book - it was fairly cliched - but than again, it was written to be cliched. It manages to take standard tropes about 1940's Science Fiction and Noir Mystery tropes - and turn into something that is fairly seamless.The characters are fairly flat, but likable. The joy of reading this book is the world building - an alternate reality where robots came, and than went in America. The last robot built is still around - being special. Of course - with 1950's technology - he needs to recharge nightly and his memory tapes only hold about 12 hours of information. If it wasn't for the super computer running the business- our robotic hero wouldn't be able to function.It has a lot of standard science fiction tropes - Russian spies with the technology to transfer their brain into other bodies - cute blond haired clients - who only gives enough information about the task to do it. A supercomputer with motives not intended by its maker - its a fun mashup.This is a well written easy read, with interesting characters, in an interesting world. It's not great literature, but it's written as fun to read, and that is exactly what it is.
    • 3/5
      This is a good fun read, and highly entertaining, but also really frustrating because it misses out on a lot of potential.This is written as if it were a Raymond-Chandler-style noir novel in the 1950s. The narrator is Raymond Electromatic, a robot hit man/detective who is largely controlled by a mainframe computer named Ada. In typical noir fashion, a pretty dame turns up to request that Raymond find a missing person, and he ends up getting involved in something much more complicated: in this case, a very bizarre Russian conspiracy to take over Hollywood and therefore the world.As far as noir detective stories and Soviet conspiracies go, it's all quite entertaining.However, there are several big complications introduced in the book, which then have very little effect on the book. They should have either been left out, or should have been used better. For instance, Raymond stories his memories in a tape drive, but due to limitations of 1950s technology, he can only store 24 hours of memories at a time. This is rather poorly handled, because what he can and cannot remember seems pretty selective. He apparently has enough memory space to store the entirety of human culture, but he can't remember more than 24 hours? Perhaps I would have been willing to let that detail go, except that the 24-hour memory doesn't actually have any effect on what happens in the book. There's no unreliable narrator, no problems with a detective without a memory.... you could take out the detail about the 24-hour memory, and the book wouldn't change at all.The same goes for Raymond's identity as a hit-man. The backstory is that he was originally a detective, but then Ada's prime directive is to make money, and she realized Raymond could make more money as a hit-man than a detective, so now he's a hit-man and the detective thing is just a front. Except that he spends the whole book detecting. Again, you could take out this detail, and it wouldn't actually change the story. And then there's Ada.... There's a really fun schtick with Ada and how Raymond can always imagine her smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee even though she's just a computer. There are some hints that there is something somewhat sinister about Ada, and since Ada controls his memory (more or less), she could really manipulate him and that could add some interesting dimensions to the story.... except the book never does anything with it.This is a fun book, and I enjoyed reading it (I listened to the audiobook, and the narrator was good). But I was frustrated by under-used backstory elements, and by the missed potential of those elements.
    • 4/5
      Review copyAdam Christopher is a novelist and comic writer, and award-winning editor. He's the author of The Burning Dark, The Machine Awakes, and Made to Kill, and Adam has also written novels based on the hit CBS television show Elementary. His debut novel, Empire State, was SciFiNow's Book of the Year and a Financial Times Book of the Year for 2012.Born in New Zealand, Adam has lived in Great Britain since 2006.I spend much of my spare time reading and reviewing Horror. I can't seem to get enough, but every once in a while I like to step outside of the genre for something a little different. I stumbled upon Made To Kill over at NetGalley and I just couldn't resist the concept. Robot noir, set in the 60's, with the last robot on earth, once a P.I. and now an assassin. How could I not read this.Raymond Electromatic is a Licenced Private Detective. It says so right on the door to his office. Only thing is, he's no longer a private detective. He's now a hitman. What about Azimov's "Laws of Robotics"? Seems those laws don't apply in this alternate timeline of Los Angeles in 1965.Once you're able to wrap your head around the idea that everything you know about robots is wrong, it's kind of fun to relax and get lost in this crazy story of a Russian plot to take control of the minds of innocent Americans.The story is conceptually strong, but did seem to be a bit forced at times. Even taking that into consideration, I found myself enjoying this wild ride.Made To Kill is available in hardcover, paperback, e-book, and through Audible from Tor/Forge, a division of Macmillan Publishing.Recommended.
    • 4/5
      I liked this book. The concept of it and Raymond. Raymond may have some human like aspects about him but it is his quirky robotic mannerisms that really make him fun, personable, unique, and Raymond. Oh and I can't forget Ada. She is the perfect girl Friday. Together they make a good working match. So why do you say then did I only give this book four stars? Well it is because of the rest of the story itself. If this book had just been about Raymond then my rating might have been different but the story itself while it had the glitch and glam of old Hollywood was "safe". There was not a lot of action and what little I did experience did not jump off the pages in my face. Plus, the characters were a tad boring. So I can remember the beginning some of the middle and then the ending. Yet, I did enjoy reading this book enough to check out the next one.