Each of the three adventures follows the Elemental Shadowrun Adventure Pattern - An anonymous corporate executive hires you to commit a crime, you break into a secure corporate facility to commit the crime you were hired to do, in the liminal space between committing the crime and getting paid for committing the crime something goes wrong, can you survive the thing that goes wrong and still get paid for committing the crime?
And despite my somewhat snarky way of summarizing the book, I actually think it's extremely good that it exists. Everyone wants to break the mold, but before that happens somebody has to make the mold and Corporate Punishment serves that role admirably. If it weren't for the large rewards and high degree of difficulty, I'd even say that this book serves as a better introduction to the game than First Run.
Although, when it comes to setting baseline expectations for the Shadowrun setting, it would probably be more functional (though definitely not more accurate) to run an adventure where the PCs were not betrayed by Mr. Johnson.
That's the theme that ties the book together - the corporations are ruthless and when you're done working for one, you're going to have to survive the wrath of the one you worked against and at best Mr Johnson is going to be no help at all. At worst, they're going to be one off the ones piling it on.
Technically, only the first adventure, "Double Take" features a direct betrayal. Mz Johnson works for Telestrian Industries. She hires you to steal confidential data from Universal Omnitech's branch office in Tir Tairngire, but because of the elven nation's cutthroat feudal/capitalist politics, she's going to frame Saeder Krupp (Lofwyr is on the Council of Princes for some reason) and make the shadowrunners the patsies for the entire operation.
Classic Shadowrun.
In the second adventure, "Second Effort," Mr Johnson's betrayal is less direct. He hires you to sneak a spy into a rival corporation's secret research laboratory (which is actually a pretty fun inversion of the more typical "extraction"-type missions), but while you're doing that, he himself is (voluntarily) extracted by another corporation and when you arrive at the meet to collect your pay, Mr Johnson's boss (aka "Mr Johnson") says "Whoa, we gotta situation. The guy who hired you is probably going to burn our spy to ingratiate himself to his new employer. So now you have to go back and extract the person you just inserted. But don't worry, I'm authorized to double your pay."
Structurally, it's the best of the three adventures and it potentially ends with you very righteously killing the SOB who put you into this situation. However, the plot of the story is that the original Mr Johnson is a racist who works for the militantly racist Yakashima corporation, setting up a run against the pragmatically racist Proteus AG, before deciding to jump ship for the fanatically racist Brackhaven Investments corporation (which you may remember from Super Tuesday as belonging to the right-wing radical who lost the 2057 election to Dunkelzahn in no small part thanks to a scandal so bizarre, potentially offensive, and critically challenging that I don't have the heart to summarize it here).
And I guess what I'm saying is that Shadowrun's take on fantasy racism is . . . not something that brings a lot of value by being foregrounded.
Finally, in the third adventure, "Legacy," Ms Johnson passively betrays you by not adequately preparing you for the magnitude of the shitstorm you're walking into. You're hired to steal the Scrolls of Ak'le'ar, bequeathed by Dunkelzahn to the dragon Hualpa. And when you do, you suddenly find yourself on the shitlist of seven different corporate and criminal organizations. Technically, if you deliver the scrolls back to your original employer, she'll keep her end of the bargain and pay you the agreed-upon fee. But in order to get that point, you have to escape a literal 8-way gun battle and the only way you're going to do that is with the unsolicited help of an annoying NPC of the "smug crimelord who knows everything about you despite never interacting with you in any way" variety.
"Legacy" is probably the weakest of the three adventures, due to the aforementioned deus ex machina, the fact that the Scrolls are a pure Macgufffin ("they seem more like a vanity item than something authentically magical"), and my gut instinct that the heist is probably impossible (you have to get through layered magical and physical security on a crowded college campus where a tightly-knit group of researchers are active at unpredictable hours in order to steal an item that has no reason to ever move from the pedestal that is under 24 hour surveillance for the scant two weeks it's available before returning to a dragon's horde). But it does technically involve you in the metaplot. The last page of the book features a form you can photocopy and mail in to vote on which of the eight competing interests will canonically wind up with the scrolls (unfortunately, an internet search was unable to tell me who won that particular vote).
Overall, I'd say that Corporate Punishment is a perfectly fine book. It's got a good balance between map-based and plot-based adventures, a tolerably thematic level of backstabbing bullshit, and it takes your Seattle-based characters to some interesting new destinations (though I could not figure out why the Johnsons wouldn't just hire Portland-based or Boston-based runners in lieu of arranging forged travel papers).
Ukss Contribution: In describing Boston, the book says, "giving bad directions to tourists is a spectator sport." As someone who has aspirations to one day travel, it gives me anxiety by proxy, but I have to admit it's a funny turn of phrase, so one of Ukss' cities will be similarly welcoming to visitors.
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