“BANG!”

“The premise is a good one, but…think of this like a heist movie.
In a heist movie, how far in should we have our team assembled and be ready to do a thing? I’d say 25% at most. Fair? Because then you have to make some plans, do a runthrough that doesn’t go well, probably throw a romantic subplot in there for no reason, and if it’s the heist book I wrote, someone has to eat a piece of human feces.

Ahem.

Bang!’s team is assembled probably something like 75% of the way through, and as fun as that portion is, I think the payoff of team assembly is the thing the team does, and we get to it a mite too late here.

My other issue is that we get an initial explanation of what’s going on, and cool, I’m in. But then we go through the process of explaining this three more times with three other characters. I quite like the characters, especially the weird John McClane with magic inhalers. That shit was cool. I liked seeing them do stuff. But all the questions they have or unknowns they wrestle with are knowns to me, the reader, so it’s a little like if you took the movie Inception but instead of explaining how it works once, Leo had to explain it to every character involved in the plot.

This is better than a 2-star book, but I subtracted one star for including novel pages that are just solid walls of text, probably not necessary, and that had occasional damage to them like blood splatters and such, which make reading a bit more of a chore and slow down this otherwise speedy book quite a bit.”