It *is* better written than FSoG on the prose level, so that's why it earned itself 1 star on top of FSoG.

Else this is just another plagiarism of The Book Which Shall Not Be Named. In fact down to little idiosyncrasies, the state of utter immaturity of the MCs, the tics and spleens. Everything and everyone is the stereotype of the trope of what they might be.

Just saying, but why can't there be--just once--a friendly secretary of a CEO? Why do they all get painted bitches?

Why do people behave on first meetings as if sex was a throw-away article? Not just that this isn't very erotic, but I wouldn't want to be with someone treating sex like eating a hamburger (or rather less so, I guess these characters would take greater care choosing a clean restaurant).

I'll not even go into much further detail, I was quite simply bored. And annoyed. Irritated even.

No, I don't like it. I don't exactly hate it either, I'm between "really meh" and "bored to tears". I also do not at all and that is emphatically not at all, get the hype this book is getting.

I'll be frank, please don't bite my head off!

Firstly, it's a rip-off. It's a rather badly disguised concoction of:

1. LaMont Cranston (Lucien and Crane? Even the same initials) is "The Shadow". Which used to be a pulp novel series in the 1930s, was then put on radio (Orson Welles cut his teeth on it), and then made a movie in the mid-nineties with a still very cute Alec Baldwin as Cranston. An American ex drug-lord, ex-junkie, ex-criminal, ex-smuggler chief of mafia-don standing, stationed somewhere close to or in China, who gets abducted by a "tulku" (shaman) and turned into a good person through magic.