Lots of Action in M.D. Benoit's New Novel Meter Made

“Jack Meter ain’t no Sam Spade, ya see, but he’s one helluva private dick,” said my gay cat Pico after reading M.D. Benoit’s Meter Made. Pico, as always, was right. Sam Spade got to bump around in Los Angeles playing with the small fry looking for treasure in clay falcons; Jack Meter gets to chase the big fish all over the known universe, including one or two unknown.

This is a fast-paced, hardboiled, non-stop, seat-of-your-pants, action-packed SciFi mystery that asks the question: Where’s the damn brakes? It starts right off with a millionaire land baron wanting Meter to find his missing building. No, not gelding. You heard right: the man’s building is missing, along with the lot it occupied and all the documentation that proved it ever existed, and, of course, the fourteen people who lived in it. Just the kind of case that’s right up the alley for Douglas Adam’s Dirk Gently, only Jack Meter, unlike Gently, doesn’t wait for anything to happen. Like Sam Spade, he barges in and stirs things up to the boiling point and takes the action right in his face when it explodes all around him.

From the first novel in the series (Metered Space, Zumaya) Meter has a device melded to his arm by aliens that allows him to jump around Earth and the universe just by thinking about it. This comes in handy when you’re just about to be arrested by the police in a house full of dead bodies, or leaving a room that’s just about to blow up, or finding yourself on the receiving end of a hail of bullets from a woman you thought you might get it on with not much earlier.

Jack Meter is not one to stay out of trouble, and he doesn’t. Single-handedly – well, with a few friends, some of whom can’t stand him and others who try to kill him – he jumps into the middle of alien wars, universes on the edge of collapse, his best friend’s wife’s cooking, and a fog planet that nearly strips the flesh from his bones, all in pursuit of the missing building and the people who stole it. What he uncovers is a mind-boggling secret that threatens to change everything that we know into something we can’t even imagine.

This is a great read for the beach, an evening with the boob tube turned off, or an afternoon by the barbecue and a cooler full of beer. It wastes no time getting to the action and keeping it up, something that’s sorely missing in so many action stories these days. The universe of Jack Meter is full of weird creatures, danger at every turn, deadly beautiful women, side-slapping dialogue, and most of all, according to Pico, “action, Action, ACTION!”

Title: Meter Made Author: M.D. Benoit Publisher: Zumaya Publications eBook ISBN: 979-1-55410-302-7/1-55410-302-9 Pages: 259 Reviewed by: Biff Mitchell