Jason

I don't really like Stephen King so I wrote this off when it came out, but I got a free first chapter and really got drawn in. The story is incredibly rich, the characters well written and believable. My favorite parts were the life the protagonist lived in the past, the Oswald plot actually seemed to get in the way to me, but not in a way that hurt the story. It was a very long listen, but I got through it in under a week and I was sorry it was over.

Since it was Stephen King, I spent the whole time waiting for the horror elements to start, but fortunately they never did.

The only complaint I could have about this book is that I liked it so much I bought "It" because of the Darry connection, and absolutely hated "It". I still can't believe I'm giving Stephen King 5 stars, but he deserves every one for this book.

This book reads like it's from the golden age of sci, aliens vs humans with cold war style politics. It's very much in the style of Robert Heinlein, a very technical writing style with a lot of explaination of the physics of what's going on. It seems like it should be tedious with so much technical writing, but in Ringo's skilled hands, the story just flows.

The main charactrer, Tyler Vernon, reminded me of Heinlein's Lazarus Long. The same cranky angry attitude and drive to suceeed completely. The narrator captured the feel of the book perfectly.

Other reviewers talk about latent racism/sexism, but it's far tamer in that regard than the sci-fi classics that clearly inspired this book.

I liked The Relic, the characters, writing style, and overall flow were excellent. I just thought the almost supernatural element of the creature and the drug was extremely poorly done. It was painfully long-winded explainations of painfully bad and wrong science and tech that destroyed anotherwise excellent book.

For Reliquary, I was expecting everything Iliked from The Relic but a new and better story. What I got was more of the same, the creatures that ruined The Relic are back with far worse pseudo-science and longer painfully stupid explainations than ever.

The book really is very well written it grabs you from the first chapter and keeps the action going, I just really wish the authors would have put 1/10th the effort into actual research that they put into making up silly fake science.

The Narration is okay for the most part, nothing great, nothing too bad, but the special effects efforts kill it. For example, the pathologist walks away from the autopsy recorder microphone, so the audiobook gets faint and muffled. Well, we're not listening to the Pathologist's recording, we're listen to the audio book, we're supposed to be right there in the action. The faint echo effect when we're hearing people's thoughts is also quite annoying.

The book is a horrible cliche of the genre with 1-dimension characters that have no personality or reader appeal. They're stilted puppets going through unrealistic motions. The plot was weak and obvious. The moment the author started describing the facillity, it was clear how things would end.

The author goes on long tedious explainations of how things work that only show how ignorant he is and that he's too lazy to research. He tries to use math and computer science and his long winded proofs are just wrong. You can't represent divide by zero with subtration (and if you don't care about that you'll find the book more boring than this review). His details on assembly languge are equally wrong. I've read in other reviews his explainations of military protocol and medical science are just as ignorant, but those aren't my field. I can suspend my disbelief to enjoy sci-fi, but when it's just ignorant ramblings, what's the point?

Scott Brick is one of my favourite narrators, and he did a great job, but couldn't make up for the horrible writing.

It's hard to believe this was ever publish. It sounded like a great story idea, but in the hands of these two authors, it has weak 1-dimensional characters that are like bad cliches of themselves the plot is non-existant, and this seems to be written with zero knowledge of the subject.

As a caveat, I half way through the first file (of three) before I had to stop listening in disgust. Up until that point it was like hearing a train wreck in the sense I couldn't beleive anything this bad had been published.

These short stories have some elements of the full length novels, but the short story format drastically changes the feel of them. It's almost more like reading the 5 minute mysteries in magazines from a past era. They are quite simple and have one little "trick" that Bosch pulls out at the end.

Basically they're well written stories by a talented authour and well worth the listen but not at all Bosch style.

This book is Card at his finest writing, it's full of interesting ideas and situations and a very hard book to put down. You always have to know what happens next and it's easily the best book I've read this year. All the characters are powerful and deep in their own ways and have their own unique styles.

The only real downside is I felt like I was rereading Treason by the same author. The story outline is identical. A protagonist with special genetic traits goes from realm to realm on a divided human planet seeing all the different ways humans have modified their genes while Earth is the unseen enemy. It made things far to familiar and predictable. This is too good a series and deserves better than a recycled outline.

I'd also note that I thought Pathfinder was a self contained book until it ended with an opening for Ruins, and then going into this, I thought this was the conclusion. Ruins was just as incomplete and open ended, so I can only assume their will be a book three. I certainly like Sci-Fi series but doing it this misleading way is kind of annoying. I was hoping to see a lot more resolve or at least I'd have rather known I'm reading an open-ended series.

They used 3 capable narrators for the book, but the way it was structured every little while at random points they'd jump to the next narrator for no real reason. It was jarring and really hurt the flow of the story. Any one of the three could have done a fine job with this book, but the combination done that way really ruined the performance. I'm a Stefan Rudnicki fan, so had he done the whole book it would have easily been a 5 star performance.

First this isn't a "complete" book. It's like someone took a book and ripped it in half around the middle to sell as 2 books, the second book being Freedom(tm). There's no resolutions to any of the story lines the book just stops and you have to read book 2.

That being said, I originally gave this book 4 stars. It's a nice fast-paced action thriller that's hard to put down. A lot of the reviewers here talk about how technically accurate it is. That isn't true, it's every bit as bad as 1980's hacker movies, but since it's a thriller and not a computer book, that really doesn't hurt it much, it was just a disappointment after reading the reviews here and expecting something else.

The reason I say to avoid it is book 2. Book 2 is a horrible political rant with no real story and 1 dimensional characters that just try to prove the author's ranting. Even though Daemon is a good listen, since it's half a book you're stuck with part 2 which is total crap..

This book is a political rant with no real story. The characters are 1-dimensional and constantly act out of character to push forward the author's political agenda. There's no real story just a very weak backdrop where the situations and characters are twisted to "prove" the author's point.

It basically rages against our society how government and business act together to enslave the working class. Whether or not you agree with the politics or not it's really a horribly written book with no subtlety or entertainment value.

I suppose some people like it because it's got plenty of scenes of {spammers, evil business leaders, police/military/government, etc, etc, etc} being brutally murdered to the cheers of the geeks.

If you liked Daemon, you'll still hate this one, it's a different book in a different style.

I've read or listened to just about everything Anderson has written, including obscure stuff like Hopscotch, all the Dune stuff and his own various series. His writing style is somewhat distinctive and there is no way I will believe for a second he penned a word of this book. Perhaps he helped with the story arc a little bit, but even that doesn't feel like his style.

It is clearly an example of an established writer using his name to sell books for a starting writer.

The writing has a very weak, childish tone, this is probably a kids' book, it was painful to listen to. The narrator also did a horrible job, sounding like a whiny child. Though most of the book was children whining, so I suppose I can't blame her too much, it still made an unpleasant listen even worse. The story/plot, such as there was, was incredibly weak and stupid.