River of Night

[pwalker8]

Over the years, I've found that some books I try, read a few chapters, can't really get into it and move on to something else. Sometimes, if the book was simply a book that wasn't catching my attention rather than being bad, I'll go back an try again. Sometime I get hooked the second time around.


I had this happen with the latest Black Tide Rising book, River of Night by John Ringo and Mike Massa. I first tried the book when it came out back in July, got about a third of the way through, got tired of it, put it down and moved on to something else. Then last week, I saw it in my to read pile and decided to try again.

I think that some of that is that, unlike the first four Black Tide books, Ringo used a co-writer Mike Massa for the last two (which are basically what happened to the other brother Tom) and thus the books have a somewhat different feel to them. I suspect that Mike Massa wrote a bit more of this one.

Also, the first third of the book is mostly setting up the action and introducing the bad guys. Frankly, I think that they would have done better to simply treat the bad guys in passing rather than change the view point to them for several chapters. In the movie Road Warrior, they don't go back and spend a lot of time showing you how the leader of the bad guys gathered his band. He's just there.

Of course, Ringo has always been a bit more interested in the really bad characters, kind of like S.M. Stirling in that respect. I think one of the reasons that Black Tide Rising series worked so well for me is there really is no over arching evil person to distract him from the protagonists in the series, the bad guys are the zombies.

Either way, when I picked it up again, I scanned quickly through the sections that I had already read, then started reading as I usually do. This time, I quickly became engrossed by the book and read it to the end. I'm guessing that the book was the end of the series since the basic story line was concluded.

I'm glad that I read these last two books, since what happened to Tom was probably the major missing plot line from the series. There are a few continuity issues but nothing major.