I got the bundle on sale after having listened to and enjoyed the Unconventional Heroes series. This is the only reason I finished both books. Whereas the Unconventional Heroes is witty, action-packed and features characters with depth, this series relies more on an absurdly large quantity of underdeveloped characters.
If I had to guess, the author had a lot of ideas about the world in this series, but didn’t have an actual narrative. As a result, they wrote A LOT of backstory, kept adding characters, and when they still didn’t have enough material, padded their word count with repetitious prose. It’s too bad that an editor didn’t read this manuscript and offer some guidance such as “maybe two short novels don’t need 8+ person raiding parties” or “there’s very little forward momentum because your main character is a completely passive non-entity” or “I get that you want them to be a party of misfits, but they don’t this story isn’t moving forward organically because they literally don’t fit with each other.”
Joel Froomkin does a good job but there’s not much that can be done with such poor material.