CORRUPTION: A Marshal Boothe Tale of Justice

CORRUPTION is nothing more or less than a science fiction Western, complete with lonely showdowns and vengeful villains.  It’s much more than that, however.  This is a novella with an eye for the emotional turmoil of its protagonist.  Marshal Jayson Boothe could easily be a cookie-cutter tough guy with a badge and a gun.  Instead he is a thoughtful family man who isn’t at all pleased about the position in which he finds himself… but whose sense of justice will not allow him to accept a corrupt system that victimizes the innocent.  He does the right thing, even though it may cost him, and he’s got a LOT to lose.

The novella is a tie in to the full-length science fiction novel SIMON VECTOR.  Boothe appears very briefly in that novel, although his appearance is really just a cameo.  CORRUPTION explains how Boothe came to be where we find him in SIMON VECTOR, but you don’t need to have read the full-length novel to read the novella (or vice versa).

CORRUPTION also takes place on the same Martian colony, and during the same time period, that League Entertainment’s CORRECTION novella takes place.  The feel and the mood of the two stories are very different.  CORRECTION is a horror story, whose central character is a mentally deranged serial killer.  CORRUPTION is an action-adventure tale with deliberate Western themes, whose protagonist is as righteous a man as you could want.

There is a thematic tie between the two stories, however, in that Boothe is hunting a DIFFERENT serial killer.  Mars is a frontier world, in some ways a very backwards place, and seems to have no shortage of human predators.  When Boothe realizes that the Powers That Are have conspired to set his prey free to kill again, he confesses to the crimes — and proceeds to bring his own brand of justice to the Martian landscape.

This story is a lot of fun.  Highly recommended.

CORRUPTION is free on Goodreads until midnight, 25 September, 2012.