Review: Blocky and Choppy
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 11 11, 2013
This is the 3rd entry in the Brotherhood of the Blade Trilogy, following Afterglow. The storyline for this novel picks up seconds - not minutes, hours or days, but seconds - following the close of the previous book.  Eventually this book wraps up all but one of the threads begun in the previous novels. However, that item could possibly be resolved in another book in a related series by the author or in a crossover manner by collaborative author J. R. Rain in one of his Samantha Moon books.This novel continued in the blocky and choppy writing style that was used in the previous two entries. First, the scenes did not flow from one to the next. Secondly, there was no time line established between scenes and events; you couldn't tell if events were separated by hours or by days.And thirdly, the dialog was equally choppy. And by this I do not mean to imply that the dialog was spare and to the point. Rather it was disjointed, superficial and forced, scripted rather than natural. I realize that most of the characters were European and that they might possibly speak in that manner indicative of English as a second language. However, there was no depth or true emotion to their speech; it was just that, a speech.Just as the dialog was lacking in depth, so was the character development. The characters felt like cardboard cutouts in a moving diorama. It took until Chapter 20 (there are only 23 chapters total) before anything broke below the surface of a character's public veneer.However, my disappointment in the book was gelled by two other factors. The first is the editing of the story itself. While there were some formatting errors in the e-book version, the main complaint is error of content placement. As one example, at one point Corbin (an ancient werewolf) is described as wagging his tail and panting in agreement to the plans for an attack on the vampires. I shook my head in bewilderment, read back to see if I had missed something or if something had been left out - again - because I was pretty sure he was still in human form during this discussion. Sure enough, two pages later the author now has him change from human form to werewolf form. This type of error, and there were several of this type of error, should never have occurred considering that Ms. Paludan herself is a professional book editor in addition to being an author.But the thing that bothered me the most centered on the fact that I had just finished reading Witch Way Out, the 3rd novel in the Witch Detectives series, also by Eve Paludan. I gave it a 4-star review, with character depth, character growth and dialog being top-notch, following in the same arc as the previous two books of the series. In the end, I just couldn't believe that both books, both series, were written by the same author. They were that disparate in writing style and depth.