Unstoppable Arsenal

★ ★ ★ 1/2 (rounded up)
This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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This book is just pure entertainment – it's not trying to be anything else. You've got a super-genius whose inventions and investments have made her super-rich (to fund further inventions, primarily) who has used this genius to turn herself into an Iron Man-like superhero. She's pretty much done all this to enable her to find her parents – which she did at the end of the last book. She starts this book by going to retrieve them from their imprisonment.

But they're not prisoners – they're content, happy, hard-workers in a lab with utterly no memory of a daughter. Kate, Amelia's friend and telepath determines their minds have been altered and the only one who can restore their memories is the one who altered them. Launching Amelia's next big quest.

She soon discovers that there are a lot of powerful telepaths who are unaccounted for and maybe the conspiracy she's been theorizing about isn't a bunch of evil masterminds undermining the super-heroes of the US. Maybe, there's some mind control shaping the questionable decisions.

As if all this isn't enough, Amelia meets an actual, no fooling, mythological figure who forces her to realize there's more than just science afoot in the world, and she's told that literally the future of the human race depends on choices she's making.

All this is told in the same fast, dynamic and engaging voice and style that characterized this first book. Haskell can tell a story in a way that seems effortless, which is too easy to overlook and take for granted. I put this down and had to fight the impulse to grab the next installment right away and not stop until I'd run out of books in this universe to read.

Oh, and there's a killer last line, and I'm excited about what that development is going to bring.

I don't have a lot to say really – this is just a fun series. Period. Great super-hero action, with just enough depth to satisfy, without going so far that it slows things down. I don't know what Haskell's long-term plans are, but I could read another half-dozen of these books, easily.