Pawn's Gambit

The first half of this book was much slower and less engaging than Never Die, but it more than made up for it with an electrifying second half. The last third, in particular, paid off so much characterization and set up. I didn't want to pick up a sequel for Never Die immediately; that felt like a contained story. But even though I know the third Mortal Technique book will be another pseudo-sequel, I'm very excited to read it.

The one thing I would change about this series is that everyone is CONSTANTLY referred to by their hero name, and it's silly as hell. This is entirely subjective, but I just imagine actual human beings only referring to other human beings as The Art of War, The Ticking Clock, The Laws of Hope (the worst offender, by far), The Roaring Tiger, The Falling Moon...I understand it's a style thing, but for my personal tastes, I think it would be much better if they were only occasionally called those names. Like how Sun Jian was sometimes called The Tiger of Jiang Dong and Sun Ce was sometimes called The Little Conquerer. (I know Three Kingdoms was a big influence on Rob Hayes for this series).

I gave this book five stars because I enjoyed it a lot, but I do have one major criticism of the story itself. Without getting into spoilers, the main character of this book is dealing with the fallout from the previous book (it is still a stand-alone though, all relevant info is relayed quickly) and I absolutely DO NOT buy the consequences from the MC's actions in Never Die leading to where they are and what issues they're dealing with in Pawn's Gambit. I kept trying to just ignore this, but it was brought up so many times, and was critical to the middle sections of this book. No matter how hard I tried, this bothered me. I do not believe the characters in the world would treat this character the way they do. It's nonsensical to me and because of that, the middle section of this book suffered a tad.

All in all, another quick and engaging read for this series. I'll probably hop over to one of Hayes' other series in the meantime and see how they hold up to Mortal Techniques.