The Righteous

Sweary mercenaries strike again! The Articles of Faith follow the basic premise of Murphy's Law - if it can go wrong, it will go wrong. The Righteous picks up pretty much where The Black Hawks left off. Throughout the course of these pages, the shenanigans of the mercenary band follow the progressive bad choices and escapes by making further bad choices. The found family basis is wonderfully done, the irreverence and needling of each other forms a constant backbone to the progressively more dire straits the gang finds themselves in.

A warning - do not read this book if you are easily offended by bad language. For me, this definitely helps capture the spirit of the books (soldiers are some of the most foul mouthed people out there), and the bickering between the characters provides one of the great joys of reading this!

I thoroughly enjoyed this. Yes it is silly, yes it is crude at times, but my god this is fun!

DNF at about 60%.

Here is the thing. This story has a bunch of characters, which I like. But then... it just feels like they are never properly utilised. They are quirky and fun, but we never really get to know them properly, enough to really understand why they do what they do. We get told a couple sentences hinting at their past, but it's never fleshed out. Things happen and it still feels like the story is just starting.
I lost my enthusiasm.

I don't think this is all bad. I just feel like something is missing. Something about the creation of this is incomplete and made me feel like a half-formed idea, where the characters and the places were created, but it was never brought together. Somehow the unifying top layer just wasn't in place.