A.C. HaskinsBesprekingen

Oh man, this made me so sad.

Great intro, great atmosphere, interesting main character.
I was totally on board and the writing didn't suck for once.
This read like someone actually did his homework before publishing a book.

Over time it became clear that the plot was mediocre at best with cardboard cutout villains and incredibly obvious clues and foreshadowing without any subtlety that took away all surprises very early on.
But even with that, this could've been a good 3-star book easily.
The atmosphere is gritty, the author is very intentionally going for realism in the way fights play out to the point of overexplaining stuff as if he has to justify his writing to his audience sometimes. But that is also mostly fine, it's noticeable but not overly disruptive.

Further into the book, I started to get tired of the increasingly melodramatic self-pity of the MC.
The more he expressed his pain the less believable it became. All the while the plot stakes suddenly explode from a simple murder mystery to literally saving not only humanity but all life on earth period. The problem with that was that nobody acted accordingly. The actions of the protagonists in regard to the main plot became increasingly ridiculous and unbelievable. But I already wasn't really reading the book for of the plot because, as I already mentioned, it became clear early on that it's very shallow.

But then the ultimate show-killer happens. After 70 years of drinking away his pains, someone tells him to just talk about it and let his feelings out and he is just cured basically. It's so unbelievably cheap and cheesy that I can't even find words to express it. Not to mention that the excuse for the entire conversation was absurd. The secondary protagonist acted angry, childish, and entitled, and said some stuff to the MC about how she had the right to know stuff and the MC just agrees like what she is saying is completely reasonable while it is not anything of the sort. And not just because he couldn't take the nagging. He seems to genuinely agree with her absurdly distorted assessment of the situation.
Responsibility gets twisted into knots until nothing is even remotely recognizable as having any kind of common sense anymore.

In the last third, the book just starts to rapid-fire all the worst clichées. It's like he went through a list of bad tropes that follow a typical situation and chose the most tired and cheap one over and over again.

I was so pissed about the rapid crash in quality and believability that I dropped the story mid-chapter 25.

I was so happy to have found a hidden gem but as it sadly turned out, the lack of popularity has a good reason.

I am honestly baffled how this happened. Was the author so far up his own ass after having written a more than decent intro that he couldn't recognize anymore how increasingly ridiculous his story got?

Amazing!

A sorcerer and his Glock 20 have to save the world once again.

Thomas Quinn is down and deep into his bottle as he tries to avoid his past. But someone has to save the world and he has to face his inner - and outer - demons.

It's really fun, even if I don't know if a story with and about Quinn can ever be the same to make this into a good series (the title does hint at it).½