Busted Flush (Wild Cards, #19)

While this is not one of the best books in the Wild Cards series, I still very much enjoyed it. One does wonder how much George R.R. Martin has to do with the editing these days (hasn't he been writing something else recently?), but the book nonetheless has signs of his style, at least in terms of the sorts of themes it covers.

Here, the heroes of the previous volume Inside Straight, now working for the UN, are split up to deal with political problems and humanitarian crises across the world. This gives the book more of a feel of a set of separate stories then the more tightly linked prior one. This despite the fact that the plotlines pop in and out through the book (as they do in Song of Ice and Fire), rather than it being a sequential set of short stories.

Taken individually, I found all the plotlines interesting in their own right, it's more that they feel a little disjointed when taken together. As the middle book in a trilogy, relatively little is resolved in a big way by the end, and one suspects some of the stories, perhaps especially that with the Radical, are setting up events for the next volume. But in between, we get a lot of good characterisation and development that we don't often see in superhero stories.

If there's a weakness in the writing it's that Melinda Snodgrass still can't do Brits; the language of characters like Noel and the Highwayman is just weirdly unconvincing, and the country feels strangely American. Other than that, though, we get a feeling for superheroes in a real world facing real consequences - the storyline with Drummer Boy is worth particular praise here.

So, perhaps not everything it might be, but well worth a read, although ideally it's best to do so after Inside Straight. Come to think of it, if you like superheroes, and you like Game of Thrones, why exactly haven't you tried this series yet?