dana_naylor's reviews
475 reviews

I found the story mostly confusing.
Vlad is trapped in a house that doesn’t correspond to reality. He meets up with Verra at one point and she behaved differently with Vlad than in prior books. 
Maybe it’s starting to set up the end of the series?
Very meh.

Meh.
It prevents the book from being too ghoulish as can happen with true events, but it makes the book much weaker. Hearing what a magazine editor ate at a restaurant while a writer pitched a story in a flashback as the writer is dying of dehydration in the Sahara….nope, nope, nope.

The ACTUAL nonfiction part of the book where physiology is discussed and history is discussed  was interesting(the gin and tonic was invented by the British in India as a more palatable way to take the malarial drug quinine). The made up parts are fairly cringy (the character who catches malaria and dies has hook up sex with a girl from Australia on the night he’s bitten by the mosquito).

I had to read the chapters in fits and starts.
It was interesting enough for me to continue reading and to finish, but there are many better survival books out there.

And as a content warning, the book was written before 2001 and uses the height of the Twin Towers as a comparison of climbing height.

Fun read.
I like The Thursday Murder Club books more, but I’ll check out the adventures of Amy and Steve when the next book in this series is published.

Won’t make sense reading it on its own.
I was surprised at the ending and am very curious to see what will happen next.

I had fun with it.
Lots of questions as the story was beginning, but I enjoyed his Hardcastle book a lot, so I was willing to trust in the story. 

It took me a while to get into the book.
Main character dying of cancer in our world was tough for me.
Fantasy world was initially eye-rollingly badly written to me (each chapter begins with quotes from the "book") and it was tough to keep characters straight when they have titles like the Beauty Dipped in Blood, the Cobra, and the Last Hope in addition to names.

But once I was into the story fully (somewhere around 40%), the book became really tough to put down and I fell in love with it. I love the characters (most of them) and their growth.

I don't know what will happen in the next book or how the story will all work out, but I had great fun with this and will anxiously wait for the next.

Content warning - the author had cancer, so her descriptions of it are particularly intense.

If you’re reading the 59th book in a series, you hope the characters will grow.
It’s neat seeing Eve and Roarke grow together.
I don’t know if a reader could just start here, but I expect it would be very possible to simply read it as a mystery set in a future time.

I’ve been reading these books since the mid-90s when Roberts’s pseudonym of Robb was still the only name on the cover. It’s been wonderful seeing the growth of the characters and the social change in the attitudes in the books. They’ve always felt very sex positive. Roberts is letting her social beliefs show through very clearly in the books and love is love. The murder is tough as we see the loss and grief of characters who loved the victim. 

I found the book mostly slow until towards the end where I just absolutely adored it. I found the confrontation with the killer to be very satisfying. This probably won’t get a reread, but I did find myself interested in picking up one of the earlier books in the series to see the growth of the characters.

Claustrophobic, locked-room trilogy of stories told in alternating points of view. Set in winter (snow drifts). Took me about halfway through the book to make sense of what was going on, but I was interested enough in the stories to keep going despite being confused and having questions. Things wrapped up relatively satisfactorily. May be interested in reading more of Tudor’s books.

I didn’t like the book at first….felt like there was too much exposition with getting the situation set up.
Once the fake marriage was in play, I had a lot of fun with the book. I may pick up the third when it’s published. I probably won’t pick up the first.

Told in 3 parts.
First is Vlad’s pov from when he was still with Jhereg.
Second is many different povs with Vlad not on stage. It occurs when he’s on the run.
Third is later still and in narration style of Phoenix Guards which works well and is entertaining in the short term, but it was beyond exhausting and annoying after two chapters. That section consisted of six chapters :(

Story was entertaining overall, but it felt like a collection of novellas rather than a book.