will avery cates finally come out on top in jeff somers' the terminal state? well, kind of ...

The undying, nasty, bemused assassin Avery Cates returns in Jeff Somers’ The Terminal State for the fourth time.

Will Avery finally manage to kill himself off – via alcoholism, his death wish, ex-friends now enemies or the general travesty which is his world? Or, is he actually already dead but hasn’t yet worked it out?
These are crucial questions for Avery Cates fans – of which there are many – who have been captivated by Somers’ dystopian and generally bleak view of the future.
Somers’ writes books that are like “an action movie in print” as the The Daily Telegraph described the previous book The Eternal Prison – a description I used previously in my review of that book: Avery Cates returns in Jeff Somers' dystopian world of The Eternal Prison
In The Terminal State the street killer has been scooped up by the army and pumped full of technological augments, but he’s also lost control of his own body via some sort of brain implant.
Still, that’s not going to stop him from trying to kill whoever manages to piss him off, even if that person is supposedly in charge of his body.
On top of that, he discovers that person who’s just bought his body is none other than his oldest enemy Canny Orel; but Avery is willing to play a long, at least until he can take out Canny as well as himself if he has to.
It’s unsure if Somers’ always planned for there to be four Avery Cates books, but in The Terminal State he manages to tie up a number of loose ends from the previous three – The Electric Church,  The Digital Plague and The Eternal Prison – but still leaves an opening for the next installment.
Thank goodness. Somers’ version of the future is one to be wary of, true, but it’s as entertaining as hell and Avery Cates is one of those characters that you just know could go on forever. Here’s hoping.

The Terminal State by Jeff Somers is published by Orbit Books and is available from good book stores and online.