I appear to be on a streak where I read a lot of superhero tales. Ian Healy's Just Cause was the latest, and while I don't feel its the best, it definitely stands up well to comparison with hte many other offerings out there.
Ian writers with a smooth style that makes for easy reading. He doesn't use a lot of description, but there is enough that you can build a picture of what's occuring and where.
The characters are good, if a bit flat. The main character Salena Thompson is well developed and described, but others seemed to be mostly a power and maybe a physical description. Deep descriptions of personalities or even showing Salena's interactions with any but the most important characters was uncommmon.
but there is a great foundation built here for future stories, so perhaps Ian will give us deeper glimpses at characters as the story continues.
I did see two issues.
The first was the final climatic fight. For all of the build-up to it, the descriptions here were paper thin, and in fact the end of hte fight was so abrupt as to ignore some of the concerns the characters had entering the fight. It was like Ian decided "I need to bring this to an end. All fighting stops."
the aftermath was similarly skipped on.
The second was the villain. He's described as an evil mastermind, but its almost at the point where I consider him completely over-the-top. This is probably one of my biggest concerns with any superhero story. There is a point where the pwoer levels just become so ridicilous that the story loses almost all of its punch. For me the villain here is right at that limit, and I found the conflict less compelling than in other stories where the balance of power was not as skewed.
Lovers of superhero novels will enjoy this. And I do hope that Ian keeps writing. He's created an intersting world and characters, if he can avoid losing the story to ever increasing power levels.
