I really liked Liege-Killer, the first book in this trilogy. The pacing was great, and I enjoyed the sci-fi mystery and suspense aspects. Ash Ock, the second book, wasn't as good, but I reminded myself that it was the second book in a trilogy, and Hinz probably needed to do some setup for the events of the third book. Now that I've read the third book, I wish I could go back in time and tell myself to stop at Book 1.

This book was incredibly painful to get through. For long stretches, all anyone seemed to do was sit around and talk. Timmy, Susan's mentor, lectured Susan, Gillian, and Empedocles about Sappho's origins, motives, and plans for almost 100 pages. Information necessary for certain scenes to make sense wasn't revealed for hundreds of pages. For example, the Os/Ka/Loq were mentioned long before they were explained, and the phrase “This kascht reeks of the lacking” was overused before it even meant anything to me.

The other reasons why I didn't like this book are almost entirely enormous spoilers. You've been warned.

So yeah. This book didn't work for me. And the “to be continued” feel at the end wasn't intriguing, it was annoying.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

Liege-Killer was a thrill ride, and I was expecting more of the same from Ash Ock. For the most part, Ash Ock took place 56 years after Liege-Killer, during the time when the Paratwa were scheduled to return to Earth and try to force humanity into slavery. It should have been an exciting book, as good or better than the first. Unfortunately, it wasn't.

As I fought to stay interested in the story, I tried to pinpoint the problem. Was it the characters? Jerem Marth was back, upgraded from whiny 12-year old to elderly Lion of Alexander. His emotional attachment to Gillian hadn't diminished over the years – in fact, it appeared to have grown. It was cringe-worthy, made more so by indications here and there that Gillian did not share his depth of feeling. Even so, Jerem was more bearable in this book than he was in the first. Susan, the series' new female POV character, was actually harder to deal with.

In this book, a couple men who appeared to be radical members of a group known as the Order of the Birch were unpredictably massacring people. Susan had the bad luck to be caught in the middle of one of their bloodbaths. Because one of the killers recognized her and feared being identified by her, she continued to be targeted and was soon on the run. Instead of focusing entirely on the problem of survival, she stressed herself to pieces trying to figure out how to both stay safe and keep a scheduled date. In her mind, avoiding breaking a date and thereby protecting her social status was at least as important as staying alive. I was dumbfounded.

I was relieved to learn that I wasn't the only one. Her own aunt didn't believe she was really in danger, because what person in their right mind would give equal weight to both safety and social status? By that time, I had begun to feel a little more sympathy for Susan, because I'd learned more about her history. Her parents had been members of the Reformed Church of the Trust. When Susan was 11, they killed themselves in order to ensure that they could receive an Earth burial before greater restrictions were put in place. Susan spent years in therapy, and I'm assuming that the iron grip she kept on her social status was a kind of coping mechanism. Even so: life > social status. I wanted her to realize that. I can't reveal how things went for her without majorly spoiling things, so I'll just say that I wouldn't have guessed from her earlier POV sections that her story would go in that direction.

Book 2's "prominent female character" count was higher than Book 1's, but I'm not entirely sure how I feel about them. There was Colette, quietly using need and desire in order to maneuver humanity into place for the imminent hordes of Paratwa. Even though her primary offensive weapon was clearly flawed, she soldiered on. On humanity's side were Buff and Martha, tough, confident female Costeaus. I ended up nicknaming them Gillian's “Bond girls,” because of the way they interacted with him. They were fighters, yes, especially Martha, but something about them didn't work for me.

I didn't realize it until I got to the end of the book, but the biggest reason why Book 2 didn't work as well for me as Book 1 was probably because Book 2 was primarily setup. Colette and Ghandi's sections gradually revealed the methods the Paratwa planned to use to enslave humanity. Susan's section's hinted at how humanity might manage to stay free. Book 2 only revealed and arranged those threads – it didn't tie them up.

Nick and Gillian's sections attempted to drum up some of the thrill and mystery that made Liege-Killer so exciting, but they failed. Gillian was too scattered, and his opponent felt far too flawed compared to Reemul. Nick's efforts to deal with the sunsetter program decimating E-Tech's archives only managed to be exciting for a couple pages.

Although this book definitely wasn't as good as the first, the paths it pointed to were interesting enough that I still plan to finish up the trilogy. I'll cross my fingers and hope that all that setup was worth it and that The Paratwa contains some serious badassery.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

I checked this book out because it was in Freading's “space opera” section, I liked the cover, and the description was coherent and made it sound like I'd be in for a lot of action. I'm happy to say that my decision was a good one, and I fully intend to download the second book in the trilogy once I've finished writing this review. Although this was originally published in 1987, it has aged pretty well.

At the beginning of Liege-Killer, someone has gone to the ruins of Earth and secretly revived two people from stasis. Those people turn out to be Reemul, a deadly Paratwa. Each Paratwa is a single mind that happens to have two bodies, called tways. One tway can maneuver a target while the other one swoops in for the kill.

A few hundred years ago, a few thousand Paratwa were responsible for the deaths of millions of humans. They were halted only by the Apocalypse (Earth, ruined to the point of being unlivable) and E-Tech, a group that believed science had run amok and should be tightly locked down and controlled. In the book's present, E-Tech is still in power, but only just. Then the Paratwa Reemul reappears and goes on periodic killing sprees, and E-Tech gradually regains the public's support.

I don't know if there's another, better subgenre term for it, but the bulk of this book was basically a science fiction thriller. Readers got various pieces of the overall puzzle via a variety of perspectives: Rome, the head of E-Tech; Paula, a single mother who witnessed a Paratwa attack; Bishop Vokir of the Church of the Trust; and Gillian, an experienced Paratwa killer from the past who was revived in the book's present. The various revelations and twists had me at the edge of my seat, although there was a big one that I guessed several hundred pages in advance. I couldn't wait to see what the Paratwa were planning, why they were doing it all, and whether Rome, Gillian, and the rest of E-Tech would manage to learn key pieces of information in time.

Liege-Killer is fairly violent, although it wasn't anything I couldn't handle. Not all killings and massacres were on-page – of the more stomach-churning stuff, I can recall one massacre, a flashback in which a Paratwa essentially forced a group of humans to eat one of their friends for dessert, and Gillian and his team's discovery of Reemul's “plaything” (warning: no on-page rape scene, but Reemul is a pedophile and has particularly monstrous tastes). The action scenes were pretty good. Mostly, it was either Gillian or Reemul against opponents who were very outclassed. I kind of wish Gillian and Reemul had had more chances to face off against each other.

As much as I enjoyed this book, it wasn't perfect. I had to grit my teeth every time Jerem, Paula's 12-year-old son, appeared on-page. There are many things I could call that kid, but I will refrain so that this paragraph doesn't turn into a giant block of swearing. I tried to tell myself that he was only 12 and that I shouldn't hate him so much, but it was hard. I did a search, and it looks like some variation of “Jerem whined” occurred only a dozen or so times. It felt like more. Every time Paula tried to get him to shut up and obey so maybe they wouldn't be killed, he had to get just one more complaint in. At one point, he learned that his mother had lied to him about his father. He had been an abusive addict, and, after he died, Paula had wanted to protect Jerem from the truth. So, what did Jerem do after Paula told him all this? He sulked, accused Paula of abandoning his father, and said, “My father's dead. And it's because you're just a stupid bitch.” (178).

I don't think Jerem deserved the stuff that happened to him after that, but I wanted him to apologize for what he'd said and, you know, grow up. He never did either of those things and, in fact, continued to whine and sulk when he was finally reunited with his mom. The only moments with Jerem that I enjoyed were when Gillian was stuck in a hotel room with him and refused to take any of his crap and when Paula was getting the both of them packed up for their new life with the Costeaus and flat out ignored Jerem's whining.

Besides Jerem, there was one other thing I didn't like about this book, and that was its female characters. Hinz did badly by them. Not just one, but two women died so that Gillian could become the man he needed to be in order to battle the Paratwa. As far as I can remember, Rome's wife, Angela, was often in his thoughts but never had any on-page actions or dialogue. I suppose Nu-Lin was okay, but she didn't really do all that much.

Paula had the potential to be awesome. She was street-smart enough to know that the visitors to her antique gallery were bad news and needed to be guarded against, and capable enough to evade E-Tech's people and deal with Costeaus (pirates) without falling apart. I figured she'd meet Gillian and turn into a love-struck idiot. I was only slightly wrong. The guy she fell for turned out to be Aaron, the pirate with the scarlet penis tattooed on his face.

Hinz skipped all the scenes that might have made their relationship believable. Since there was no emotional build-up to indicate anything else was going on, I initially figured Paula had slept with Aaron so that he'd be more willing to help her find her son. Imagine my surprise when it turned out they were really in love. Paula went from hating Costeaus in one chapter to being in love with one the next time she appeared on-page, and, from the point on, she ceased doing anything other than being Jerem's mother and Aaron's lover. It was disappointing.

Overall, I enjoyed this book and was drawn in by the mysteries and suspense surrounding Reemul, the Paratwa plan, and the two Paratwa hunters from the past, Gillian and Nick. The world was fascinating, and I'm looking forward to reading Ash Ock. I just could have done without Jerem and wish Paula had finished at least as strong as she'd started.

Additional Comments:

For the most part, this book was error-free. I only counted three instances of what I think might have been OCR errors.

(Original review, with read-alikes, posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)