The most recent of the John Wayne Cleaver series (though there's another coming soon), this follows John drifting across the country with Brooke, hunting the few remaining Withered that Nobody knows about.
I've enjoyed the series for quite a long time, as it had a fairly interesting premise and the monsters are generally quite cool. They tend to be a range of unusual characters, and there's a fun balance between them and the sociopathic John.
Unfortunately, that sociopathy, which acted as a strong character hook originally is beginning to tire. It now feels a bit too much like a whiny teenager (which, to be fair, he is). The ongoing "oh, I'm so evil, it's wrong, how can I exist in a world like this" has lost a fair bit of its power as we've watched him over five books behaving in a pretty reasonable manner for the entire series.
This is compounded by the character of Brooke, who is (admittedly unsurprisingly) rather depressive and with a tendency to bemoan her condition unecessarily frequently. That gets annoying quickly.
What's interesting, is that as soon as the FBI turn up, the plot goes in to overdrive. It suddenly has a wonderful pacing, that rattles everything towards the end and the confrontation with the villain. That's one good point of the book though, the villain. Part of the main theme of the series is that the villains are unexpected but justifiable. There's been an improvement in the execution of that over the series, and this one has some excellent red herrings.
I'm going to stick with the series for now, as I've kept with it for a while, but we'll see how the next book goes.
Recommended.
Tagged: Book Horror Angels and demons Novel Print