Little to no characterization. I mean, to the point that whenever (yet) another action scene began, I sighed inwardly and groaned because I couldn’t bring myself to care who survived it. At. All.
The only emotion portrayed was in the description of the death of Marcus Battle’s child. Beyond grief, I got no sense of Marcus as a person. And, yeah, maybe that was kind of the point, but no other supporting characters were developed enough to take up the slack, resulting in an apathetic, whiny existence that failed to provoke any emotion more complex than the feeling that we had to keep trudging through the story for the sake of the story and the world the author created.
The author has a good grasp on how to describe the visual world via text, but it’s clear he doesn’t understand how to convey the complexities his characters or the world should possess.
I hope he tries again. I see potential in his descriptive prowess, but he needs to develop more than scenery to be a successful author.