I had hopes that this final book in the series would redeem the waste of my time reading the previous three, but sadly, it didn’t.
The fight scene on Paradise: five gangsters who are supposed to be killing Holly and her crew turn up with just one pistol between them, and then the one with the gun decides to engage in an infantile name-calling match instead of shooting people while Odeon simply walks up to him and knocks him out with a stick. The realism is woeful.
Utterly abysmal ending: Holly’s at a party at the club, dancing, and then suddenly she wakes up having been flown to a different moon after being mysteriously kidnapped from the club in front of all the guests and the rest of the gang. Really? And then, enter her kidnapper: Oh, so you’re the Heart? Yes, you want to join me? No, i’ll never join you. Ok, bye then. Finish. The end. WTF?
We get no explanation as to how Holly was kidnapped and appears the next day on a different moon. Nicole just leaves a huge gap because it’s just so utterly implausible you couldn’t write anything remotely believable.
Pathetic.
We start these four books being lead to believe that the Shadow Coalition were the most fearful organised crime gang in the solar system, yet every time we encounter them they show themselves to be the most stupid, inept, idiots in the solar system.
The worse thing about all this is that the story and Holly’s crew had such potential to become something really good, but instead it all just petered off, book by book, until we’re left with an ending in this book that amounts to nothing but a writer demonstrating that they just couldn’t be bothered.
And, just to add insult to all the injury, there hasn’t been any steampunk whatsoever. Why is Nicole advertising this as a steampunk space thing when there’s no steampunk?
I won’t be reading any more of Nicole’s books.
