My main summary statement is that it was an entertaining mystery, and I’m interested to keep listening to the series. I definitely care about the main character and am curious how his story will develop. There is room for improvement in both the story and the narration. It appears I’m in the minority regarding my frustrations with the narrator. Don’t get me wrong, you can easily distinguish character voices, which is great, but some of the voices he does are just cringy to me. There are some teenage boys that sound like valley girls, one of Skyler’s 20-something friends sounds like a 60-something aristocrat, and his friend Jamie has inflections all over the place. He also takes pauses in dialogue that seems so unnatural to me. That being said, I care more that I can tell the differences between the voices, so I bared through it.
As far as the story goes, I wish there was more investigating and intelligence from the main character. Also, there is one explicit scene in the story that has absolutely nothing to do with anything and should have been left out. I don’t mind an explicit scene if it shows part of character development or plot movement, but the scene with the ‘viking’ was completely unrelated to anything. Also, some of how gay characters were portrayed was a bit over the top for me and not very relatable.
To end on a high note, we don’t have enough of these type of stories for our community, and it was definitely a fun, entertaining read, so I’ll keep listening on. I’m excited that there are so many volumes in the series already. I hope the stories continue to evolve and get better with each volume!