Review: Nemesis Games

Nemesis Games by James S.A. Corey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I guess there's a rule that odd-numbered Expanse novels, Leviathan Wakes notwithstanding, just aren't as good as the even-numbered ones? (Wait, isn't that a law of Star Trek? And didn't they try to revise the official canon of which movie was which in the series to count Nemesis as an odd-numbered bad and then reverse it to count J.J. Abrams' awesome 2009 movie instead? But I digress.)

I picked this book up super-duper quickly after Cibola Burn because I just had to know where the story would go next, but not unlike Abaddon's Gate, I thought Nemesis Games suffered from overlength and had a plot that didn't really go anywhere. It certainly wasn't as memorable as its immediate predecessor, even with more involvement from Avarasala - and even she felt a little underused here, especially after Cibola's epilogue promised her involvement in an intriguing new chapter of the story. But in bits and pieces, this novel worked well enough that I still enjoyed the read, even if it was a hell of a lot slower than I would have liked. And hey, at least I'll happily count this as the latest book I brought with me to the drive-in to wait for the sun to set and the movie (in this case, Wonder Woman) to begin.

At least the end of this book finally started rerailing the overarching plot with another intriguing hook. Though this book in general burned me after Cibola's similar hook, I'm still eager to keep on going and hit Book 6 - at which point I'll be pretty much all caught up just in time for the seventh book that I hear hits shelves later this year (if it hasn't already.)

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