New Burning Sky Review - Runalong The Shelves

I almost missed this. Thanks to Joe for letting me know about it.

Overall, this is a very positive review, but the reviewer brings up a great point. I'll get to that later. Here's an excerpt from the review over at Runalong The Shelves.

The character dynamic was appealing.  This is a military team with two skilled and respected women operating alongside the men and the men themselves are a diverse group of backgrounds including former criminals and a gay man who again the team have no issues with.  It feels a refreshingly 21st century set-up.  Ultimately the TST enjoy what they do and while they all have their reasons for fighting and it is clear they complement and need each other on a very deep level.

My only reservation was the final reveal is a historical character who really set the ball rolling on the confrontation the team need to address.  That character is shown in a less than positive light and as far as I’ve been able to see he had no ulterior motives and instead is a respected literary figure to Persian culture.  Artistic licence must be expected in the genre but to base a story in Afghanistan and use a famous Muslim character as a potential antagonist (and to be fair their motives are still unclear, so this may be revealed in future stories as a red herring) I felt made this a little out of step with the rest of the book.

So, this is an excellent point. Having just finished the second book, I'm going to include a disclaimer in the acknowledgements. Basically, I had to have a foil for the team. I had to have someone be the bad guys. I chose to make the ultimate bad guy someone who everyone sees as good, because that's just good plotting. To the reviewer's question about it being a red herring, I can convincingly say that it was not and that the next book, Dead Sky, will provide much more reasons for his presence and desire to do what he did. I know this is sort of cryptic, but I don't want to ruin the reading experience for you, but I did want to mention that the reviewers criticism here is valid.

Here is the full review.