Where the Action Gets Kinda Dark

Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire by Dan Hanks
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Look, it's pretty fun.

But it didn't work for me.

I love a good pulp fiction novel, I enjoy Indiana Jones-type stories, and this looks like it's all about that. It's very promising in the beginning. But while it seems like it's gonna be a light-hearted world-traveling romp with lots of action, it turns deadly and dark with innocent civilians dying right away. Not the bad guys--just regular dudes getting caught in the crossfire. That makes the quips and family arguments seem out of place to me. Nobody seems to care about all the death happening around them, as if they're all a bit sociopathic. Makes them hard to relate to.

It also feels like it's gonna be a kinda steampunk thing, with futuristic science blended with 1940s technology, but that's a fakeout. You get a touch of that, with a cool little gadget that sends people to another dimension, then nothing for most of the book, then a little at the end again. Most of it is just people flying in old planes and riding on old buses.

Most of the story is about the main characters blazing a trail to whatever relic is on their wish list, then getting it taken away by the bad guys who were right behind them the whole way. That gets old. And the rest is the good guys getting captured and held just down the road from the next item. So, so many times the real bad guys wanted to kill the main character when they had the chance, when they had her locked up and powerless, but they don't do it. They've killed all kinds of people, so murder isn't the issue, but then they keep our good guys around for no good reason, even after arguing about whether or not they should kill the MC. In other words: nothing matters. They solve all the ancient puzzles but don't win. They get caught but don't lose.

There is no winning. There is no losing. There is just stuff happening and innocent bystanders dying.

And I didn't care about any of the characters. In fact, I kept forgetting who half of them were.

Ultimately, I was disappointed. Uneven in tone and pacing, with a lot of backstory for no good reason, this feels like book 4 in a long series, and it suffers for that. I may give the author another try, but I dunno. This was just good enough to finish.

IMO.

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