The second Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex book is actually a collection of three novellas, or maybe lengthy short stories. As with the other GITS:SAC novels (The Lost Memory and White Maze), any one of these could have been made into one or more episodes of their own—they were, after all, written by series co-scripter Junichi Fujisaku, who obviously knows theGITS:SAC canon from the inside out. They are not only entertaining and briskly-paced, but serve to fill in a great deal of background information about the show’s setting and character’s motives. Because these particular installments are that much smaller than the ones in the first and third books, they’re not as ambitious in their scope or execution, but still intriguing, and they each end with a solid little twist that’s right in line with the themes in GITS’s extended mythology: the larger questions of identity and self that the show constantly plugs back into.

“Double Targets” gives us Tanaka and Sasajima, two cybernetically enhanced down-and-outers who work dirty and dangerous jobs in one of Japan’s post-WWIII Refugee Zones. They’re actually ex-military men who were disavowed by their own country, and can’t afford to be picky about their work. One day they apply for a “dismantling” job, only to find out it’s a codename for an assassination. The target: Daisuke Aramaki, the white-haired chief of Section 9. The rest of the group springs into action, though it's not simply to protect Aramaki, since he’s been a target more times than he can count. What they want to know is who commissioned the kill and where they got their funding. When Section 9 follows the trail to its end there’s a nifty climax that calls to mind that deceptive editing trick in the movie The Silence of the Lambs.