The Minus Faction: Episode 1 - Breakout

This is a modern superhero comic, a good one, in book form, and also available in epub, and IIRC pdf and kindle. [But epub can be munged into any format you like anyway.] The world is as fantastical as anything the Avengers have had to deal with, but a great deal grubbier and more ambiguous. The protagonist in Episode 1 is a good man whom fate dealt a generous hand, once upon a time, and then stripped more than all of it away.

The Minus Faction is of a newer time, when trust in governments has largely and deservedly vanished. The writing is sound throughout, with sharp dialogue and a cast of strong and interesting characters, and a couple of cultural in-jokes here and there. And then every now and then there's a golden paragraph of prose that uses the perfect words to say exactly what the author wanted. Not many writers, even the big-name ones, have that knack, but Rick Wayne does. It makes some small parts of the book extraordinary powerful considering it was only really intended to be a modern pulpy superhero novel.

Recommended to anyone who likes slightly grittier superhero stuff with some slight cyberpunk influences (nothing very overt). Also recommended if you want to look at a work with the occasional block of text that expresses itself as powerfully as anything Kurt Vonnegut has written, just to see how it's done.