Pathos

Link, Book 2

De: Nathan Hystad

Narrado por: Jonathan Davis

Ethos is real. The crew of Excursion Two made it safely to the colony planet, but where are the colonists?

Jane’s ancestor has recovered from nearly three centuries in a damaged cryochamber, but Linus Vanderbilt is holding onto secrets. He warns them never to use the Link, then disappears with his trusted robot assistant, Atticus.

Captain Calvin Brooks, loyal to the Diplomats his entire career, begins questioning everything he’s ever believed. When he learns of a distant war, he must choose his allegiance, if humanity has a chance of survival.

Luke Dalton, won’t stop until he finds his family, even if it means venturing into a conflict they don’t belong in.

Pathos continues the epic, galaxy-spanning alien colonization story that began with Ethos.

From Nathan Hystad, the Best-Selling author of First Life, The Event, Lost Contact, Taken, and many others.

©2025 Nathan Hystad (P)2025 Audible, Inc.

Easy listening

Interesting story, a few details missing but easy to listen to.
Narrator not so good at the different character voices but doesn’t detract that much from the story.
Not sure what the very critical reviews refer to, likely that I am easily entertained ;-)
Good follow on from book 1, and I look forward to the next book.

One thing stays the same

Nathan Hystad has a great imagination and always makes the female the strongest warrior of all, in every book. Nit sure if it’s virtue signaling but sets unrealistic standards.

Frustrating

I find this book incredibly frustrating because the overall concept is just interesting enough that I want to know what happens, but the storytelling style makes it such a slog.

Pros: Interesting original story and direction, good mysteries

Cons: There are so many unnecessary side characters with no development or purpose beyond occasionally showing up and saying something. It's like the author wanted every grunt to have a name so that when the group splits up, there is always a familiar character in the story. Unfortunately, some of them are very infrequently mentioned and possess no backstory so whenever they come up, I find myself thinking, "Who is that again?" There are also very few main characters that seem to possess good judgement, so the actions of most of the individuals who are central to the story seem unbelievable. The level of hubris is exhausting. I also agree with another reviewer who said this feels like a first draft or an outline. There are many twists and turns but the delivery is lacking. It needs more character development and descriptions of what things look like or information about how the various settlements and cultures operate. It's just so dry, and the narration is pretty low-key and without much flourish which does not help. Then narrator is not bad. It would have been fine if the book was more gripping, but the combination had me spacing out and going back and listen again many times.

I'm on the fence about whether I want to bother with the third one because this is the longest it's taken me to get through a book this short.

Feels like it was just phoned in.

I have listened to and enjoyed almost all of Hystad's series. I'm always excited to see a new book from him come out. I don't think I'm going to finish this series, though. This book felt more like the outline of a book than a finished story. Most of it was just someone explaining how things had happened instead of letting us experience what happened. And I don't mean the way they refresh you on things that happened in the previous book. It felt very unpolished and, frankly, boring. I really don't care about the characters or where this is going so I think I'm going to skip this one and hope for a new book in one of his other, much better, series. Narrator was good though.