Ricky Pine's Blog, page 6

Review: The Butcher's Masquerade

The Butcher's Masquerade by Matt Dinniman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As I’ve worked my way through this series, it’s been a roller coaster for me in terms of quality. It didn’t start out as great as I expected given its massive hype (let’s not forget, Ace bought up all the books and has been reissuing them in very fast fashion in hardcover these last few months), and while it did improve for me after another book or two, we’re at a point where I’m giving it once again a 2....

Review: South of Nowhere

South of Nowhere by Jeffery Deaver
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Colter Shaw returns for his fifth Jeffery Deaver novel in a storyline that might just be too high budget for the CBS series adaptation Tracker, unless they saved that budget for a season premiere or finale. Oh, and some of the details about Colter’s family wouldn’t be able to be incorporated into the show anyway, since the show is definitely taking its own path in that regard. Here, however, Deaver presents a bo...

Review: His Face Is the Sun

His Face Is the Sun by Michelle Jabès Corpora
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is for sure a serious candidate for my favorite book of the year, and will at least stay in the top 5 if it doesn't outright hit the number one spot. An expansive high fantasy set in a fictional kingdom inspired by ancient Egypt (the author is herself of Egyptian descent and took inspiration from stories passed down by her father and her grandparents), with four protagonists in different social c...

Review: The Gate of the Feral Gods

The Gate of the Feral Gods by Matt Dinniman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“Stay the fuck away from gods.”

It’s so odd how this series, for all it’s been a hit, fluctuates in quality for me from book to book. I gave the first two books 3 stars (really the first was a 2.5 rounded up), and then the third book started what I thought would be an upward trend. But now here comes the fourth book and fifth dungeon and we’re back down to three stars again. I think a huge part of it is ...

Review: The Tainted Khan

The Tainted Khan by Taran Matharu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Matharu returns to his first series of adult fantasy with Jai striking out on his own and finding his way to the Steppefolk, to whom his true people are connected, in hopes of ultimately bringing down the Sabine Empire that destroyed his family and countless others. In this sense, it’s like if Dune Part Two shed its sci fi elements to become Steppe Part One. The book noticeably dials down its predecessor’s litRPG...

Review: Coldarius: The Origin of Gallium

Coldarius: The Origin of Gallium by D.L. Hannah
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The prequel to Platirius follows a character originally from the chilly but ironically more hospitable world of Coldarius, chronicling the rise of the dreaded King Dubian (among other important events) through the eyes of one of the best and brightest on the planet - Gallium, a gifted youth in many ways. Seeing him on the cover (humorously enough, to me, his cover model resembles a coworker of mine)...

Review: Midnight in Soap Lake

Midnight in Soap Lake by Matthew J. Sullivan
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Unfortunately this one fell victim to the Goodreads hype machine and fell hard as hell. My hopes were high for this one - a sort of latter day Twin Peaks in a small Washington state town, but desert instead of forest, and imagine my surprise when I learned that Soap Lake was a real place. But for all the hype, this book’s pale, dusty imitation of Lynch (not to mention a watered down Night Vale) wound u...

Review: The Last Hero

The Last Hero by Linden A. Lewis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Lewis concludes their debut trilogy at great length, though I’m pretty sure this book was printed on thinner paper so it’d look a little less 600 pages long. Like its predecessor, it achieves that length by meandering a lot over its course, with its multiple POV’s, though it does make quick work of bringing back one who appeared to have died at the end of Book 2. But of course not, as I suspected almost immediatel...

Review: The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook

The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook by Matt Dinniman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

”They will not break me. Fuck them all. They will not break me.”

Okay, I have to admit it…now we’re cooking. The third book in this series goes to the fourth dungeon, an immensely complicated railway network called the Iron Tangle, where it really doesn’t help to have a map because it’d probably have too many dimensions for humans to perceive. As it is, while Dinniman does provide a rudimentary ske...

Review: Carl's Doomsday Scenario

Carl's Doomsday Scenario by Matt Dinniman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The second book of Dungeon Crawler Carl steps up the game in the third level of the dungeon, here presented as “the Over City,” resembling Vegas in a lot of ways (especially with its faux open air setup like Fremont Street), but built as one of several layers of a giant old volcano. Also like Vegas, there’s a lot of sex workers to go around, with Carl and Princess Donut having to contend with a cavalcade ...