I've finally finished this, which means I can choose a Halloween Bingo read from among my e-books without disrupting a current read. When I did that last year, I ended up never getting back to the book I was originally reading before Halloween Bingo started.

I really don't know why this book exists. It barely added anything new to the Paratwa universe and introduced numerous possible inconsistencies into the series timeline and world-building.

I'd like to start Halloween Bingo with a relatively clean slate (manga, audiobooks, and the nonfiction book I just started don't count), and so I'm working to finish this. I should be done with it fairly soon.

In the past 150 or so pages, there's been the revelation that some matchmaking has been going on, which would have been sweet except it was fueled by particularly invasive date rape drugs. Also, Gillian entered the story and has been acting creepy - he likes to sniff Bel's face and neck. I can't recall if the trilogy ever explained how Gillian and Nick came to know each other and how Gillian and Catharine were separated, but I certainly don't recall the details that have come up here. The way this book set things up, it's a wonder Gillian didn't kill Nick after he got his memories back.

It's too bad the last two books in the trilogy were so terrible, or I'd be tempted to reread them to see whether everything Hinz wrote then and now actually fits together.

One thing this book is doing, and I'm not sure yet if this is intentional, is making the Paratwa more sympathetic. Yes, there are six or seven thousand deadly Paratwa assassins, but there are tens of thousands of Paratwa total. Most of them live relatively ordinary lives. Meanwhile, Nick and Bel don't seem to make a distinction - they think the Paratwa should be wiped out, all of them. Even the Paratwa assassins have shades of gray in this book. The current scene is introducing a Paratwa assassin's human wife, and they seem to have a loving relationship. 

Man, anyone who reads the trilogy after this book is going to have some serious whiplash. Maybe I missed it or forgot it, but I don't recall there being any mention of the Paratwa being anything other than ruthless killers (and, in a few memorable cases, rapists), even in the scenes that were focused solely on them.

This has been slow-going. I'm starting to think that Liege-Killer was the only book in this series worth reading.

Why does this book exist? There have been a few big revelations, but they only count as big if you haven't read the original trilogy. And if you're new to the series and were planning on reading the original trilogy after this, well, Binary Storm spoils some of the trilogy's biggest revelations.

I feel like the author just wanted to write a lot of world-building details. So we have lung restoratives, respirazones, servant and assistant bots, edible ads, and suicide cults. Is there a plot? I'm still waiting to find out.

And Hinz still sucks at writing women. I liked Bel at first, when she coolly recognized that Nick was probably complimenting her because he wanted something from her, but then she fell in lust with him. It was so out-of-character for her that even she wondered whether he'd slipped her some kind of futuristic date rape drug (there are multiple kinds, and readers got to learn the details of several of them), but no, it turns out he just has that effect on her.

This was published in 2016, 26 years after the last book in the original Paratwa trilogy. I read the trilogy back in 2014, so I'm a bit fuzzy on everything that happened. I recall really liking the first book, being somewhat dismayed by the second, and outright hating the third.

I just spent the past 39 pages very confused, probably more than a newbie to the series would be. I had assumed this was somehow a sequel to the original trilogy - difficult, considering how much was destroyed in the last book. I finally got online and checked and, yeah, this is a prequel. Okay, I'm a little less confused now, although I still vaguely recall Nick having been brought out of cryo not long before the start of Liege-Killer.

So far a Paratwa informant has told Nick something interesting that readers haven't been clued in on yet, and we've gotten to see Paratwa living arrangements. Which includes nitty gritty details on bowel and bladder function, for some bizarre reason. I absolutely don't recall simultaneous toilet use being a thing in the original trilogy. It seems like a ridiculous detail for Hinz to saddle his badass binary assassins with.