1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
great sify!, November 24, 2011
This review is from: Stingray: You Can't Hide Forever (Kindle Edition)
It is amazing how good this book is, so many "famed" authors should learn a thing or two about Zeiger, the vivid imagination, the narrative and description of the events really take you in to this great adventure, i cant wait for the sequel!
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Good Writer, Disappointing Story, February 20, 2012
This review is from: Stingray: You Can't Hide Forever (Kindle Edition)
Its not my policy to buy an ebook before I finish the sample, but this was one of the rare author's whose story had so engaged me that indeed I bought it before reaching the end of the sample. For three quarters of the book I was intrigued by what was unfolding. The main character, Eps, has just enough mystery to take usual conventions off, yet he filled so many others that at the three quarter point was utterly shocked. He assembled a crew, had a cutting edge tech ship that the bad guys were doing very bad things to get and even had part of an alien government come to his aide near that climax. Then the author disappointed me. It wasn't the odd habit of capitalizing the beginning sentence of a paragraph like most would a chapter, it wasn't the inconsistent use of language, tame most of the time then out of no-where he gets salty to go back to tame without any particular rhyme or reason.
Let me stop here and say, if you hate a spoil-ish review, come a halt here or skip to the end.
Spoilish as I wanted to title this 'The Hero is suppose to SAVE the girl'. He gathered all the forces of good (okay a little exaggeration, but pretty much), even had an alien military who owed him come to help (albeit for them to rescue one of their own) only to find the girl they were out to save, spent three quarters of the book preparing to save, was dead already. Not in the bad guys killed her before hand, or even killed her out of spite (although the violating her was going over the top), no she dies of some disease that was triggered before she was abducted. People had died to try and stop her from being taken away, there was all this build up of how nice and wonderful she is, only to have it come to not getting there in time... and they even had one of the best doctors around aboard. Well granted she was the one to explain what killed her.
Standing back, I can see possibly why the author did it. He was assembling a Blake's 7 sort of crew on a super ship that was pretty much the Liberator (I kept expecting the ship to 'wake up' with a Zen analog), they even had a Gan kind of character, nicknamed Bear. There was even a scene I thought Bear was going to die the way Gan had in the series. The set up was all there. The whole injustice of it all (not the scene, the point of failing) was likely to launch the series where all the crew decided to stay together to fight back.
Add to that the one responsible for the whole situation did not meet an untimely or even satisfactorily end. No, off-screen he was arrested and it was promised that 'justice will be done'.
If an author is going to have his heroes fail, do so earlier. Be gloomy earlier. Don't have success after success, even set-backs you do have are livable kinds, to just have what typically gloomy authors do. In fairness Eps said a few times 'she's probably dead' so I suppose that was a kind of warning.
If you've made it this far into the review, and don't mind the failure, you'll likely going to like this series. Good cast, good writer (even with the oddities) and good motivations. There is not only the question of who Eps is, but one could ask, What is he. I suspect in future books the author will address this.
For me, the author lost my trust. I typically pick up a book and hope the author will take me some place I would want to go even if I don't know where that is, but will be grateful at the end. I did not want to go to this place. I finished the book, he's still that compelling so I recommend him if the other points don't matter to you.
Overall good series coming, but the story made a kind of promise, our heroes had the will, the tools, even The Plan, and didn't meet the expectations raised. Still good writing or I would not have made it to the end. If the failing to save the day doesn't matter, add another star to what I've put up.
I hope this helped one way or the other.
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