Review: Character Development is starting to vanish
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 04 23, 2013
I've read every book in this series although I haven't published reviews for all of them.  This latest book continued the narrative in Kevin Rau's solid and easy to read style.  For lovers of super-hero fiction its definitely a fine example.Unfortunately, that means that it has some serious flaws that in my mind drag it down to 3 stars.The first problem is that character development seems to have been almost completely abandoned at this point.  Viewpoint characters change constantly so its rare that you get to fully experience a characters thoughts and feelings.  Hints are given out, but nothing complete.This also contributes to the next issue I have which is that the enemies seem to be pulled out of comic-book central casting.  They are uber-powerful except for 1-2 hard to discover weaknesses and they can put together elaborate plots and plans in hours.  H.E.R.O. - Malice is a wonderful example of that as the bad guys develop part of the plan in less than 2 days despite the extremely high scientific barriers to success they themselves describe.  Later they managed to modify a drug that has to be manufactured for a specific DNA signature in minutes and inject someone they captured far after their initial foray into capturing test subjects.That said, I like most of the characters, even if I feel that Kevin would do far better to choose one character and follow them throughout a book rather than jump from character to character every chapter.  This pattern reminds me way too much of a comic book and while it can be fun, it definitely prevents these books from reaching the quality of Wearing The Cape, Confessions of a D-list Supervillain and Velveteen v the Junior Super Patriots.