I had heard about this series through a “sneak peek” at the end of another Tom Abrahams book so I was happy to get an opportunity to listen to it for free in exchange for an unbiased review.
I had mixed feelings about the book and found myself having to separate the “Story” from the “Writing” in my ratings. I thought the story was great, four stars; it was fun, somewhat unique, and easy to listen to – of course it didn’t hurt that Kevin Pierce was narrating. But the writing itself fluctuated between a 2 star and a 3 star for me. It must just be me though, I see that Torrent gets very high ratings from just about everyone else, but there were too many things about the book that bothered me to give it that high of a rating: editing mistakes (e.g. one sentence describing water at someone’s waist while the next sentence calls it neck-deep, stuff like that), places where writing style didn’t fit the tone, and some things that didn’t quite make sense to me. Nothing terrible, just many little things.
On the other hand, the story was good enough that I didn’t want to base my “Story” rating solely on how I felt about the nit-picky stuff. There was enough deeply descriptive writing that, at times, I was really drawn in to the cold, wet horror of the situation and that took some skill on Abrahams part.
One thing that bothered me was the primary protagonist being named Dr Steven Konkoly! I suppose it can be fun to include a known author as a character in a book like this but for some reason I didn’t like it. No marks down because of it though, that is just personal preference. I read a story once where the primary protagonist was named Eddie Bowers…so yeah, it could have been worse…
So, solid 3 star for me with a 4+ star narration. I have consistently felt that Abrahams could be better served by a decent editor, no idea what the story is there, maybe some future works will be better cleaned up. Until then I’ll probably still pick him up from time to time.