Anna works on the side of evil. I don't particularly know why--the character doesn't have any backstory or family history mentioned--but when we meet her, she's a temp worker/"hench" who gets employed by villains. To some degree it's like working any kind of weird temp job--her current employer, the Electric Eel, prides himself on being sensitive and "caring" about employees and things like that. She commiserates with friends, she has a date go wrong when work interferes.
Then she gets forced to be on television to prove that the Eel is "inclusive" (i.e. "I'm a booth babe?"), has to holde a brain-manipulating ray to a kidnapped teen's head, and gets her leg permanently damaged by Supercollider, the superhero, when he smacks her into a wall. She's immediately unemployed, living at her best friend's house, and dwelling on how superheroes cause so much collateral damage. She makes spreadsheets ,she creates a blog, and she gets recruited for a new job, working for the superhero Leviathan, who also has a grudge against Supercollider.
Anna rises in her job- earning the title/nickname "The Auditor," as she uses data analysis to strategize how to slowly, painfully, take Supercollider down by removing his support system. She loses her best friend, she gets new friends at work, and she starts having tender feelings for Leviathan, though this isn't really a romance and clearly god only knows how that would work given Leviathan's current physicality. (That felt a little weird/token/flat, honestly.) She may be handicapped, and it's ambiguous as to whether or not she has power herself or just awesomeness by analysis, but she does get respect and power of her own, even as even she feels bad for some of the collateral damage she does trying to end someone else's collateral damage.
This book has both a fair amount about "the banality of evil," or what it's like to work in an "evil" office and how it's not necessarily all that different, and also "yeah, superheroes are also kinda evil, or a good chunk of them anyway, when they cause collateral damage on other people." Which, good point. Supercollider himself gets worse and worse so you certainly don't feel bad about his being taken down--especially what he does to Anna later on. And when his unhappy girlfriend Quantum Entanglement is brought into the mix, things get hardcore.
This is a dark book, but an interesting one, where you can certainly debate morality all day long while reading it. Everyone's got their motivations and judgments and in their own way, everyone's guilty.
I give it four stars. I don't quite consider it a downer (it kind of ends as well as that situation is going to get), but it certainly gives you a lot to think about.
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