Rankin

Terrible, dumb character choices ruined good story

Revisado: 02-25-22

I was enjoying the book until, near the climax, the characters made a shockingly dumb choice, which had utterly predictable bad consequences, and I lost interest. I liked his last book, and I will probably read his next, but if he does it again I will move on.
Cosby does a fine job with dialogue, and with an engaging plot and strong characters with rich emotional stakes. His language is sometimes a little overdone, and Lazarre-White did a good job with the dialogue and sometimes stumbled over the philosophizing.

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Promising but inconsistent.

Revisado: 12-17-16

I liked the setting and the characters, and the general plot was interesting, but I was often irritated by the details. The story relied on overused tropes, such as the amazingly competent sadistic supervillain with endless spies and henchmen, and the heroes doing whatever the evil villain said if the villain threatens an innocent. The implementation of the supertechnology at the heart of the story didn't make a lot of sense to me, and the smart, competent heroes made some weird, lousy tactical choices.
The narrator was fine. This story had a female protagonist but mostly other male characters, and so no narrator would have been a perfect fit. Some of the male voices were a little cartoonish, but it made them easy to distinguish. She consistently mispronounced the name of the city, Tabula Ra$a, which was annoying but isn't important.

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Ridiculous courtroom drama

Revisado: 12-07-16

I liked the first two books in this series, which were police procedurals. This entry is a mix of police procedural and courtroom drama. If you are a lawyer or otherwise familiar with basic trial procedure and evidence, you'll be rolling your eyes and snorting at the absurd courtroom scenes. If you're not a lawyer, maybe you won't notice.
Books about police or crime often portray the system as irrationally hostile to police, with clever lawyers using absurd procedural rules and rhetorical tricks to bamboozle judges and juries. It doesn't work that way, and the central legal dispute in the courtroom portions of this story are silly in the big picture (a police officer is sued for shooting a suspect who reached under his pillow when told to put his hands up) and in the theory of the case (everyone focuses on whether the suspect was guilty of the underlying crimes, rather than on whether the suspect posed a threat to the police officer at the time of the shooting) and in the myriad individual decisions about evidence, discovery, and procedure. I used to work as a criminal defense attorney, and I am routinely skeptical of police use of force and the way the legal system responds to it, but, if I were on the jury in this case, I would have decided for the cop.
That isn't the entire book (there's a related criminal investigation occurring during the trial) but the trial creates the skeleton for the rest of the story, and every courtroom scene was silly and implausible and distracting. I didn't finish the book.

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esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

Badly dated, boring SF

Revisado: 09-26-16

C.S. Lewis has written some classics; I loved the Narnia stories, both as a child and to share with my own kids, and The Screwtape Letters is one of my favorites. But this, as with much mid-century science fiction, is an implausible, unscientific story exploring ideas that were played out in fiction a generation ago.

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Barely worth finishing

Revisado: 09-11-16

The story is about an elite assassin employed by a shadowy secret organization. That kind of antihero adventure can be fun, but this was a weak entry. The supposedly elite assassin is actually mediocre and uninspired, with neither training or ability to respond to perfectly predictable consequences of his behavior. The moral ambiguity is mostly ignored - the protagonist comes across as an ordinary guy who happens to kill people for a living, neither insulating himself, through stoicism or psychpathy, from its moral significance, nor particularly noticing it. The shadowy secret organization is both so secret that many people think it's a myth, but also widespread enough to have infiltrated every police organization and evaded any prosecution in the manner of criminal organizations in bad fiction everywhere. As is often the case with second-rate science fiction, the characters in the story are routinely surprised by technology that is unfamiliar to readers but, as far as the story shows, are readily available and widely known in the story world. The plot relied on a perfectly predictable late development that I anticipated at the beginning of the story, and part of why I kept reading was to see if the author had missed it, or if, as turned out to be the case, the main character missed it (which I found utterly implausible) and the author hoped that I had.
This is not really a standalone story. I'm vaguely curious to see how it ends, but not curious enough to listen to the next entry.

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Shooting for whimsical, but just silly

Revisado: 09-08-16

Maybe this worked better in the original language, but I found it shallow and meandering, with a story world that didn't hold together. The narration was overwrought. I didn't finish it.

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Poor successor to the first in the series

Revisado: 06-30-16

Meh. I like the setting, but the story is meandering and boring, and the behavior of the characters and the secret organizations they represent is nonsensical. The prose is filled with half-considered half-jokes, sort of like Douglas Adams, but distracting and not funny. The narrator gives too much attention and punch to the throwaway lines, and as a result they are more intrusive than they would be while reading paper or with a different narrator. I didn't like it enough to finish.

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esto le resultó útil a 5 personas

Needs ruthless editing

Revisado: 06-13-16

I enjoyed the beginning, and the broad outlines of the plot, and I enjoyed the ornate language. But the story got bogged down in endless, pointless minutiae, and I lost interest.

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Self-indulgent blather

Revisado: 05-04-16

I wanted to like this, but I couldn't do it. Self-indulgent, shallow, and boring. I'm the target audience, more or less (exactly the right age, but only 5-6 points of geekiness on a 10-pt scale) but if you don't have fond memories of 1980s pop culture, then you'll get even less out of this mediocre effort than I did, and I didn't like it enough to finish.

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Vapid, dull, and formulaic

Revisado: 05-01-16

I do not understand the cascade of good reviews for this third-rate effort. The prose is dull and trite, the plot meandering, and the characters shallow. I didn't finish it.

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