Books like Shadowrun #2: Poison Agendas A Shadowrun Novel

Shadowrun is one of those underdog stories where you're happy to see it succeed but you're more than a little surprised. A tabletop roleplaying game first and foremost, Shadowrun's been around since the late 1980s, a weird blend of fantasy tropes with (what was then) edgy dystopian cyberpunk science fiction. So you have Trolls with cybernetic limbs, spell casting urban elves, and dwarf vehicle hackers. It was a hoot; I was always a fan and it's still an ongoing concern though current management is about as incompetent as possible while still putting books on shelves and keeping the lights on.This book is the second of a trilogy that was supposed to be a reboot of the franchise's fiction line in 2005-ish after laying fallow for a few years. I have my doubts it was successful, as it was followed by only a handful more before the project dried up again. (Shadowrun fiction got underway again from 2010-2017 but almost exclusively as a line of epub/PDF fiction+game accessory titles.)Maybe the best thing you can say about this book is that it's short. Stephen Kenson picks up with his entirely forgettable ingenue, Kellan Colt, from the first book of the series, Born To Run. Kellan's a 19-year-old young woman, of "medium height" with brown "medium-length" hair. She's slender, has recently discovered an aptitude for magic, and makes her living as a shadowrunner, the titular brand of extralegal mercenary after which the universe/game is named.She's not particularly good at it, but she fails upward in the way only a good Mary Sue can, so I expect by the end of Kenson's next trilogy-ending novel, she'll be President. For now though, her goal is to assemble a group of shadowrunners to take on a mission for some long-lost military ordinance left in a forest somewhere. Think Ocean's 11 but where you get bored of everyone Danny Ocean talks to and the job ends up being a big fuck-up.I didn't expect much, since Kenson's previous title in this series wasn't any good either. Besides what seems to be a pretty big plot hole (why couldn't Colt just astrally project to the mission site instead of taking a team there to be ambushed, since the whole point of the operation is ostensibly reconiassance) Kenson treats us to unnecessarily long dialogues ("Hi," he said. "Hey," she said. "What's up?" he asked. "Nothing much," she answered), characters who are one-dimensional tropes that actually complain about one-dimensional tropes ("I hate these dwarf guys who pretend to be fantasy characters," said the elf blade master who just finished training the protagonist in his elf sword-guy dojo), and mysteries we don't give two fucks about ("Who is Kellan Colt's mother," asked no one ever, "and what is the significance of her amulet?") and don't get resolved anyway.But hey, there's another book to wrap everything up. Can't wait.