Neon Eclipse

By: Greg Dragon

Narrated by: Ryan Haugen

Length: 11 hrs and 23 mins

Publisher's summary

One of Case City's most skilled assassins, Jackson Cole is a wanted man. After annihilating his latest target, he quickly learns the prominent man's identity. Now, a perilous enemy seeks revenge, and rival guilds look to take advantage of his vulnerability. For Jackson, it's become kill or be killed, but will a steady aim be enough to take on the entire city?

©2022 Greg Dragon (P)2022 Greg Dragon

Neon eclipse draws you in.

I started this book on my morning walk and the story was so compelling, I kept listening through the morning of the third day. The action packed and raw emotions were so aptly described, it made the drama as palpable as watching a movie. I recommend this book as a great read. Thank you Greg Dragon.

Plot is light and no character development

I received a free review copy of this audio book, at my request, and am voluntarily leaving this unbiased review.

I wanted to like this book more than I did. The plot is light and the action is sparse. It is too wordy to be fast paced, and I never really felt connected to the characters.

This story is a Mafia story, of sorts, with organized crime families struggling for control. The main character is an assassin of one of the organizations, and we follow him through the conflict that defines him.

While this sounds exciting, very little actually happens. The book is mostly him asking people for favors, information, exposition, and a huge amount of poetic description of the world around the the man character (usually in the middle of a conversation or action scene).

The book itself isn't overly long, at less than 12 hours. However, there isn't enough plot to fill out the story. The plot is fairly thin, and uses twists and turns to justify the length. However, they feel like they were added to extend the word count, rather than be part of the story.

Like the plot, the world building is also fairly thin. While we are brought into the family, there is no effort to bridge here to there. It is a dystopian world of greed and corruption. But that's about all we know. There is no explanation of what happened to get to there. Or how there even works. We hear of politicians and working class people, but we don't really see them or how they actually live. All we get are statements that the main character doesn't want to be them, they are "clockers" and that's it.

There is also a lack of character development, in this story. The main character is boring. He has love and hate, in him, but that's it. There is no joy, humor, or personality, to bring him to life. He loves is organization and his girlfriend. He hates his enemies. Everyone else he is either mildly compassionate for or is mildly annoyed by. He feels more like a robot than a fully fleshed out character. Similarly, all the secondary characters are completely flat and what you see is what you get. The characters we don't meet are the only interesting ones, and that's a shame.

Because the characters are so flat it is hard to emphasize with them. How do you feel attached to a cardboard cutout of a person?

The super long poetic descriptions are also very distracting. Both because they serve no purpose other than to show that the author can write like this, and because they are poorly timed. Something will be going down, then suddenly the narrator is waxing philosophical about the nature of life, or the beauty of the sky, or how wonderful it is to be in love. Then bam, back to where we were. It completely stops the flow of the story and makes it hard to follow.

The story, itself, was fun at times. Car chases, fights, etc. There should have been more of this and less of everything else. Honestly, there wasn't enough of it to hold my attention.

The voice narration, by Ryan Haugen, was done fairly well. He had several different voices of both male and female. His voice was easy to listen to and understand. It was good work.

All in all, this was an OK story mixed with too much filler and not enough substance. You cannot substitute poetry for plot in a crime drama. The missing character development and world building really highlighted the thin plot and made this book difficult to stay engaged in. The voice narration was pretty good, and while I'd listen to another one of Ryan Haugen's books again, it would not be one from this series.

Great Start to a (Hopefully) Saga

This is great saga with an interesting story and characters that hold your attention, and make you look forward to (hopefully) the next book. Mr. Dragon used his unique talent to make the characters come alive and make you feel a part of the story. This is definitely worth a listen to.