Review: Excellent Follow-Up
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 10 5, 2013
After having very much enjoyed the first book of the HASEA Chronicles (sorry, Stuart, still doesn't flow for me as an acronym ;-), I fully expected to enjoy the follow-up novel just as much and I wasn't let down in the least.  Truthfully, I'd like to give it 4.5 stars if I could, there were so few real flaws in it, but more on those in a moment.  The Veil picks up shortly after the events of the first book, but Alex is worlds away from the gawky kid to whom we were first introduced.  He's still coping with the aftermath of the battle with the Sorrow, and it's that aftermath that consumes most of the book.  Meczes' writing is still as vivid and solid as ever, and I think he really found his stride when it came to the overall storyline and the pacing.  He does an excellent job with the action sequences and there's quite a few of them, but not so many that you lose sight of some important character development.  I most enjoyed the opportunity to see more about the training of a Guardian, something that I felt was missing in the first book.  It was too late to go back to Alex's training, but the utilization of a new character gave the reader the same experience.  Really well done stuff.  I only had a couple of (hopefully) constructive criticisms; there were still some editing errors, mostly things like swapping words like "prey" and "pray" here and there, but they were few and far between and didn't distract me too much.  One thing I think I would have liked was some brief re-introductions for some of the supporting characters.  I read the first book of the series more than six months ago, and when names like Paul, Scarlett and Terry started getting thrown around at the start of The Veil, I have to admit that it took me some time to mentally reconstruct the cast of characters in my head.  Perhaps I'm just getting old, though.  I think just a paragraph or two recapping previous events might have helped me.  Overall, hugely successful sequel for me, and I'm anxiously looking forward to reading the next book in the series.