This was kind of strange and not enough fun to stick with it for another 350 pages. From the cover and the description it sounds like some cool fantasy, sci-fi thing and those elements are definitely there, it just reads more like a detective novel. The main character doesn't really have much personality other than being a tough guy. There's a fair amount of action and some cool scenes, but just didn't grab me enough to keep reading when I have couple hundred other books on my shelves waiting. ( )

This book has been on my To Read this for a long time and I finally took the plunge. I should mention that the Kindle version has numerous formatting issues that leads to abrupt paragraph breaks, run-on dialogue exchanges that confused perspective, as well as several incorrectly transposed words. It's one of the worst kindle conversions I've come across.

I was very impressed with the opening chapter and the story had me hooked early. This seemed like a story I wanted to read; there were echoes of the world-building of [a:China Miéville|33918|China Miéville|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1243988363p2/33918.jpg] and [a:Felix Gilman|1042536|Felix Gilman|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1282243125p2/1042536.jpg] that I so love. However, the story never caught on for me. I kept waiting for the real meat and it pretty much dissolved into one big chase sequence. Unusual for me, I got confused between the different factions, religious theology of the world, and the motivations of the various villains - "who was with who again?".
The motivation of the protagonist revolved around a seeming MacGuffin - it does develop eventually into more than this, but the exact point of it was elusive to me, especially the way it is eventually thrown away in the denouement. The fact that the society of Veridon is fundamentally built on the discarded and stolen technology of an advanced civilisation, and gets mightily whooped when one (one!) of said advanced people's comes to town made the resistance seem ultimately futile to me regardless. I constantly questioned what outcome the various factions and characters were hoping to achieve.

Overall, I didn't really have any issues with the writing, but the story seemed to move around without establishing a clear focus. The final confrontation was drawn out way too long - like an action film where the hero and villain engaged in the kind of hand to hand combat that should have seen both killed several times over.

When my main thought for a protagonist is to let it go and walk away, the story isn't going to work for me.



( )

An action thriller set in a steampunk universe. Interesting though not very deep characters. Good plot. Action hardly stops. ( )