by Anthony Del Col

Audible, out now

Aliyah Kahn is a tech entrepreneur and hustler who’s down on her luck, big time. But an encounter with a mysterious American at a card game leads to new possibilities and an adventure she could never have dreamed of.

The Assassin’s Creed universe lends itself rather easily to all sorts of stories – the ability of the Animus to send someone back in time(ish) to experience the lives of their ancestors means you can pretty much go to any location and period of history you so choose, and the conspiratorial nature of the underlying narrative of the Brotherhood and its fight against the Templars mean that the sky can literally be the limit. To be fair, this is a story that takes full advantage of that.

The problem is, it’s not terribly well written. The talents of the excellent voice cast – including Riz Ahmed and Anthony Head – certainly stop it from being awful, but there are overall far too many minor issues which add up over the course of it for it not to be considered anything other than average.

For starters, it’s not clear why a lot of the details we learn about central character Aliyah are relevant. It’s odd enough that she has led this fractured life of being an abandoned orphan, then a card shark and street hustler, then a student at the LSE, then an entrepreneur who got lots of people (including her roommate’s father) to invest in her business and then all that money got lost so she went back to hustling. That’s a convoluted origin for any character, but then we get even more as the tale unfolds… and the difficult is in knowing what the point is of a lot of it – what does it add to the story, how does it inform the narrative or feed into any sort of arc for her? The answer is, disappointingly that it mostly doesn’t. The one relevant factor is her claustrophobia, and even this tends to disappear and reappear as and when the story finds it useful.

Then there’s the odd nature of the supposed central quest: she’s recruited by mysterious Americans to perform a mission which will see her witnessing the life of her ancestor, an Assassin from the 1600s, so that she can find out a code imprinted on a counterfeit coin which will somehow stop some mysterious computer program from wrecking the world in some unspecified way. It’s exactly as preposterous as it sounds, and it only gets more so when you factor in that said ancestor is a master assassin who’s blind and that the tale involves him hanging around with Sir Isaac Newton.

And to be clear, it’s explicitly stated by the story that the Assassin Omar has been blind since childhood. How he has managed to become a master assassin in spite of this is never really explored, and seldom even comes up in the story itself. Worse, the author appears to occasionally have characters simply forget Omar is blind – at one point someone specifically references him having ‘seen’ something occur. At another the character himself mentions imagining balls as colourful affairs and he isn’t talking about the behaviour of the guests. The way in which the character’s blindness is even introduced is odd and smacks of trying to do a gotcha on the audience despite it being mentioned in the actual promotional materials for the book. It just feels more like a gimmick than an actual thought out character trait.

There’s also tension in the way in which characters in the 1600s are made to speak. There’s a jailer who at one point mentions ‘asses’ being kicked rather than ‘arses’, there’s Newton’s habit of exclaiming ‘excrement’ every time he’s frustrated, and there’s an awful lot of dialogue that just feels stilted, expository and odd.

This is all before we get to one of the real core issues – the random way in which the narrative drives forward. There is for example one subplot element which immediately gets discarded mere moments after it’s happened, and nobody ever bothers to explain it. Worse, later developments in the plot actually run completely counter to it, making the whole thing feel a little nonsensical. Other random elements thrown in towards the end of the story make no sense whatsoever, leading to a frankly bizarre final ‘chapter’ in which, having done the thing that the story had been driving toward all along, a completely new mission involving someone who really ought to have been very much more significant has to be undertaken. It feels like a postscript that should actually have been its own story, feeling as if perhaps the author had originally pitched a duology of stories and then had to squeeze everything into one instead.

Mostly, it just feels disjointed and rushed. The random changes of pace, double crosses and reveals start to make it feel more like one of the video games on which it’s based than an actual narrative drama. That might work when you’re sitting with a controller in your hands, directly involved in the action. It’s less ideal when you’re just sat listening to it all play out.

Verdict: An excellent cast and one or two genuinely interesting ideas can’t save what feels like a poorly thought out, rushed narrative which feels like it might have benefited from a few more editorial passes before being recorded. 5/10

Greg D. Smith