The Consuming Fire

This was reasonably entertaining, but it did feel rather like the characters were just pieces being moved around a chess board, not real personalities acting out of their own motivations and constrained by their own knowledge.

It starts out very slow, with a largely irrelevant personal history of a church official, and then segueing into . . . a committee meeting. However, it does gain momentum pretty steadily, and by the end I wanted to know what was going to happen next, and found some of the revelations really intriguing/cool/satisfying.

Unfortunately the resolution involves a plot device verging on deus ex machina, which drained a little energy from what was otherwise a Crowning Moment of Awesome. Still, it was a fun ride.