5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
An Uneven Ending to an Uneven Series, May 12, 2002
This review is from: Predator & Prey, Book 6: Executioner (Paperback)
Predator and Prey: Executioner is a novel set in White Wolf's World of Darkness. Though it features Hunters (normal humans "imbued" with mystical powers to battle the supernatural), the book also contains mages, vampires, ghouls, and other baddies from White Wolf's roleplaying game lines. In order to understand what is going on in P&P:E, readers should be familiar with some of the other novels in the series, especially P&P: Judge. You can follow the story without having read the other novels, but you'll be missing out on a lot of the work's depth if you do.
Now that the basics are covered, the question of "Does Clogar like it?" can be answered - sort of. Yes, I did like parts of this novel; no, I don't think it is as good as it could have been. Gherbod Fleming does a decent job of bringing the characters and plotlines from the five other P&P books together for a "grand finale" to end the series, but gets less than 300 pages to do it in. It just isn't enough room to do the job properly, and many of the scenes feel forced and artificial. Yes, there are a few extremely dramatic parts where Fleming's writing really stands out (most notably when Douglas Sands deals with his shattered life and dead son), but it is rare. I may not have enjoyed how things turned out in P&P: Werewolf, but compare how battles and discussions are done in that book with what is going on here, and you'll understand what I mean - Executioner tends to just fly through events like it is a summary rather than a novel, and it is unable to pull off believability or get us to care what happens because of that. Of course, a LOT of loose ends created in the other five novels are tied up by the last page of this one, but it I think I'd rather have had those areas left open then have seen them ended so quickly and without much struggle.
In short: The novel is OK, and did a fair job of ending the series. There are worse books out there, and if you've enjoyed two or more of the previous Predator and Prey novels, you'd probably enjoy Executioner enough to justify the cost.
Side note - the following characters appear in P&P Executioner: Douglas Sands, Julia, Matthew (Muckracker), Nathan, Abraham, Johnny, Cleo, Mike, Laurence Maxwell, and Lionel Braughton.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
