Titanium Noir is another novel recommended to me by ChatGPT. This is an unusual book in that it was good enough for me to read to the end, but even during the read I thought it was majorly flawed.
The book is sold as being Raymond Chandler-like in a science fiction universe. It fails at both. The author tries too hard to write like Chandler, but cannot match his style, sense of humor, verve, and the protagonist simply isn't as smart as Philip Marlowe. In particular near the end he lets the villain goes knowing that the villain will come back for him. That's insanely dumb. It was clearly a case of "turn off the intelligence of the protagonist so that I can get a payoff at the end with a cinematic ending."
The science fiction fails too. The premise of the book is the existence of a treatment (Titan 7), that basically cures all diseases and conditions by bringing you back to childhood and then regrowing your body through puberty. The side effect is that you end up much bigger and taller, etc. This obviously fails the physics test. A human body cannot scale up to those proportions without looking completely inhuman and different.
Read Richard K Morgan's Altered Carbon instead. That's the closest thing to Raymond Chandler. (Rest assured the novel is much better than the Netflix TV show of the same name)
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