His only friends are the quasi-dictator who runs the city, a local drug dealer, and the artificial intelligence system in his flying car.  And Turo has other big problems: He’s spent most of his life as an orphan with no memory of his father and only a silver chain and ring to remind him of the mother he briefly knew. But when a deranged military commando from his family's past returns to exact revenge on Turo and the city he calls home, this tortured soul must confront the dark secrets of his own history and the genetic experiments responsible for his superhuman powers. 

Can Turo stop this madman in time to save his city – and himself? Will he learn the dark secrets that shaped his desperate existence? Does he even care enough to try?

I seem to have a read a flurry of this kind of post-cyberpunk, sci-fi-noir thriller recently, and while there's a definite 'throwaway' element to them that ensures you never take them too seriously, I'm also really beginning to appreciate them much more as a genre, the way I suppose you only really can when you've consumed enough of a thing to properly compare and contrast.

So let's get the tropes out of the way first:

1. Oppressive, dystopian city backdrop - check.
2. Down-at-heel, lone-wolf main character - check.
3. Bad-ass job that he's really good at - check.
4. Cynical outlook and bad attitude - check.
5. Strong moral 'code' means he's not all bad so we still like him - check.

Yep, you can layer these things one atop the other until the cows come home, it almost makes for good sport playing 'noir bingo' while you read, but as with a lot of genre writing, it's not the tropes you use it's the way you use them that counts, and Loton uses them all to great effect - fresh enough to hook you in, but then garnished with enough of his own brand of slick writing style and black humour to keep you reading till the end.

Written in the first person, in true noir style, Kai-Me-Rah sets its stall out from the first page introducing bad-ass, bounty hunter Turo, our erstwhile hero, as the hard-drinking, drug-fuelled, womaniser he is. A chase and a kill later we find the reason he punishes his body that way is that he can. He's abnormally resistant to the effects of the drugs and drink, very strong and with highly tuned senses that make him an excellent tracker (great for being a bounty hunter) and able to almost predict when trouble is coming. He's also in need of a decent score to get himself back in the big time before his name is added to the police list of 'better off dead'.

Soon enough he meets a woman - soon to be 'the' woman - but things are interrupted when he's summoned by government enforcers, The Unity, and presented with the chance to take down the big score he needs. But things are not as they seem and Turo, without all the available information, is fighting blind until he discovers something about himself he'd never known. In that moment everything changes and it becomes a quest to uncover his past and understand who, and what, he is.

Kai-Me-Rah is really nicely written. The characters, Turo especially, are well rounded and the wry one-liners are laced with a terrific gallows humour. The plot is different enough to keep you interested and the central reveal about Turo, when it comes, is deftly handled and as unexpected as it is inevitable. The city backdrop is a little too cookie-cutter dystopian megalopolis and might have had a little more texture to it than "the poor live here, the rich live there" but then keeping things simple and concentrating his efforts on the lead characters plays to Loton's and the book's strengths so it's maybe just as well it remains just that, a backdrop.

Secondary characters have stuff to do and are three-dimensional enough to warrant their places. You can imagine them off doing their own thing when not directly involved with the story and that's no mean feat as a relatively new writer. That said Kai-Me-Rah is not without cliche and likewise the science-fictional bits and bobs are nothing new either, but the whole is much better than the sum of the parts and because the story gallops along at a decent clip, these blips can be glossed over as it's delivered with such panache.

Kai-Me-Rah is self-published, and often - from bitter experience - that rings alarm bells and sends me screaming for the hills. But this time I can happily report a novel that stands head and shoulders above the morass of self-published novels out there and I'll happily recommend it.

Kai-Me-Rah is self-published by Steven Loton and is available FREE on Amazon Kindle.

Unsurprisingly Steven Loton can be found on Twitter and Facebook.