Description
LEXI LEFT HER OLD LIFE BEHIND.
As soon as Lexi flees the dead-end UK to start a new life with her Canadian boyfriend, a new fear quickly bubbles to the surface: what on earth is wrong with her? Are strange dreams (and troubling new sleepwalking episodes) just about the stress of uprooting herself and the anxieties of her shaky gender transition? Seeking answers, a lead finds her just as much as she finds it, pulling the bovine into a whole new mystery beneath the city of Toronto.
MAXWELL KNOWS HE SHOULD RETIRE.
A legendary supervillain with a decades-long career, the masked master of secrets is hesitant to admit he’s feeling every bit his eighty-nine years of age, and fears he’s lost his edge. When one last infuriating enigma presents itself, however, the wolf can’t help but dig deeper.
Drawn together by something neither of them quite anticipated, Lexi and Maxwell’s stories intertwine, in…
OVERDUE
Cover by Shapeless Ink
Author: A. A. Reynolds
Style: Literary Work
Content: Novel
Pages: 256
ISBN: 978-1-61450-659-1
Publication Date: April 2025
pj wolf (verified owner) –
Overdue, a Korps Universe novel by A. A. Reynolds, is not like any of the other novels in the series so far. Through the narrative, the theme that keeps jumping out at me is the unkillable nature of hope.
Let me explain.
Our primary protagonist is Lexi, a Highland cow. And if you were to ask her, she’d given up on anything a while ago. Enough that a mysterious entity in the opening dream sequence urges her to kill her hopelessness, lest it kill her. At the same time, after the dream sequence, the narrative has her on a flight to live with her enboyfriend in Canada, a place where she can be more outwardly trans and gender non-conforming than in her native Great Britain. All she needs to do is find a job, and find a solution to these weird sleepwalking episodes she seems to be having.
The secondary protagonist is one who’s mentioned in that first chapter, The Dark Dossier. Also known as Maxwell, he’s a co-director of the Korps Archives and Records Division (KARD). Even though he’s pushing 90, he hasn’t quite retired yet. He has a specific psychic super power that draws him to written information on paper, and thanks to the magic of the Korps medical technology, he’s still spry enough to go after that information himself. His problem is that he has a mystery on his hands: Who is this Rob Slotis? Why is he doing all these clandestine dealings in a way that leaves almost no trace but for the name? And is he… taunting Maxwell, specifically?
Unlike most of the other novels currently out, Overdue isn’t focused on super hero fights. It’s the mystery that drives it, that brings Lexi and Maxwell together after a fateful day trip to Toronto, and wraps up the two of them. Throughout the novel, we also dip into Maxwell’s past from his beginnings as an adolescent, caught up in the French resistance in World War II, to his recruitment by the British after, and finally to how he gained his infamy before he was recruited by the Korps. All in all, a bunch of cloak and dagger stuff, though it also includes a plot relevant sex scene that has the most homosexual instance of a penis entering a pussy that I think I’ve ever read.
The hopelessness that Lexi struggles with, that the mysterous entity inhabiting her dreamscape keeps telling her to kill, is real. It has to do with Greenbelt, a Hero based in the UK, and how he sold out. Before, when she was a child, she looked up to him as someone who was trying to change the world, make it a better place, especially since he spoke up for what could be done about the environment and those responsible. But it soon came out that he was taking money from industry groups and now mostly preaches a status quo message, which leads to Lexi’s disillusionment. Even so, though, she still has some hope, it’s not completely dead. After all, the novel OPENS with her traveling to a new country to meet someone in person she’s never met before, taking some chances. While her hopes have dimmed, they aren’t extinguished, even though she thinks she’ll be unable to make a big impact anymore. Eventually, though, she does come around to the idea of leaving bloody hoofprints on the pages of history again, even though it would be in a different way than she first envisioned.
On a personal note, that message of unkillable hope resonated with me. I chose to read this book the second time around instead of another I had intended to review because the message of how you can still hope despite the world that would beat you down was something I needed to experience again, and it has made me more hopeful for the future. But the message of hope is not where the novel ends.
Tropes are storytelling tools, and they exist because we, as humans, exist as story tellers and those who notice patterns. They are not inherently bad, because they are tools, and what matters is not that the story has them, it’s the details that separate a bad story from a good one, and a good one from a great one. I preface the rest of the paragraph with that to say that the ending to Overdue had me recognizing the patterns that were about to occur and having those recognizable patterns inflict a sense of foreboding on me that got me both times I had read the story thus far, and probably every time I will read the story to come. Again, this is not a bad thing. I am in no small amount of awe for what Reynolds did, drawing me across the pages and tipping me over the cliffhanger that leaves me, over and over, cursing that the next book isn’t out yet so I can read it to resolve the cliffhanger.
Overdue is a wonderful book. I was captivated from the start, and while the flashbacks weren’t chronological, they are placed with such intentionality to hammer home that this is the moment of Maxwell’s past that is relevant to the story, this is what drives him, and has driven him, until the story itself comes to a close. For fans of the Korps setting, you’re already in. For those who are not, Overdue may not be a great entry point due to how different it is from the rest of the Korps Universe books, but it is by no means an unworthy entry. Highly recommended.