Empire State

Well... I kind of expected to like this one a lot more than I actually did. The tone and the style was great in a Rocketeer meets Noir detective way, but for some reason I just never really got invested in the story. The plot twists and turns all the time, and while usually that's a good thing, this time I sort of gave up following that early. Probably that's more a reflection of how numb my brain is lately than a failing of the author.

What I did like is that this book presents a mystery and femme fatales with no love story (except a weird add on at the end which I'm not counting). I liked the visuals that it conjured and absolutely every person's name.

What I didn't like is that the actual writing felt a bit stilted with a lot of simple sentences in a row and the author occasionally needing to spell out why something was important. I never really understood how anything worked, and there were so many plot points to follow that I kept forgetting who was connected to whom and why. Again, that may just be my brain on standardized test season.

If you like Golden Age Sci-Fi and Noir Detectives, you are the person this book was written for, but go into able to read in big chunks. Reading ten minutes hear and there just did not work for me.