It's really hard to know what to say about this one. It starts well,
with a truly atmospheric couple of chapters, but then the reader is
dumped into a generic fantasy town with a generic fantasy villain and a
generic fantasy situation - you know the sort of thing, there's this bad
guy who runs the pickpockets, the brothels, the drugs trade, and our
orphaned heroine is forced to be a thief in order to avoid a Fate Worse
Than Death (ie working in the brothel). But why? Is there no honest work
she can do? In the whole town, is there only one person who's prepared
to give her work? If she lived there before, how come she doesn't know
anyone else? Sorry, it makes no sense to me. And when she defies the bad
guy, she discovers that actually there are worse things than working in
a brothel. This part was quite hard to read, in fact.
Then
there's the writing style. There are a lot of characters (which is fine)
but the author chooses to head-hop from one to another with gay
abandon, which simply gets confusing. This makes the story lose all
focus, since we’re just getting used to one character and it’s on to the
next. It's very difficult to develop a rapport with any of them when we
jump in and out of heads so rapidly. The whole effect was made worse in
the version I read because there were no gaps between one point of view
and the next, not even a blank line or two (stars or some such would
have worked better). [Edit: this seems to be a problem only with the Kindle for PC app; the formatting is fine on the Android app and the Kindle.]
This is not to say that the book is bad, it
really isn't. The opening is terrific, and there are some really
interesting things going on behind the scenes - Copeland's loss of
memory, for instance, what's that all about? Blakey and Mickel have
intriguing backgrounds that I would definitely like to know more about.
And there are moments when the writing is wonderful. There are no typos
and no creative grammar or spelling. But for me it was ruined by the
trite and unoriginal nature of the story - thieves, whores, an
unbelievable premise for the heroine, bad decisions all round - and a
confusing approach to telling the story. And there was no real
resolution here, this book is just setup for the next. For those who
aren't bothered by any of that, there's an interesting and dramatic
story in here, with the promise of some intriguing reveals in future
books, but it just didn't work for me. I've given it two stars because
at least I finished it (although I skimmed the second half), but it came
very close to being an outright DNF.
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