Review by: Alexander

TITLE: Shax’s War

SERIES:  Brimstone, Book 3

AUTHOR:  Angel Martinez

NARRATOR: Vance Bastian

PUBLISHER:  Mischief Corner Books, LLC

LENGTH: 4 hrs and 30 mins

RELEASE DATE: June 29, 2017

BLURB:

The boys desperately need a vacation. With the not-quite-ill-gotten gains from the Frog incident, Shax takes the Brimstone’s crew to the exclusive resort planet, Opal, for some much needed rest and relaxation. The resort has everything a demon prince and his crew could want, but an incident on the Trauma Ball court sends Ness stalking off in anger and sends events swiftly spiraling out of control.

Shax will need every bit of his cunning and his legendary luck to save his Ness as he’s drawn into a web of criminal experiments and…pink hedgehogs?

REVIEW:

I’m going to call this a trigger warning – chapter 4 featured vivisection / illegal organ harvesting and I just could not manage to listen to it.  I don’t feel that skipping it was detrimental to my understanding and enjoyment of the story though (but we’ll never know…).

I enjoyed how the third book began, just different enough from the others, primarily because of the character interaction was so casual and demonstrated how the group has come together during their previous adventures, as well in the interim.

But of course, the title gives it away and for what I felt like the first time since beginning my journey with the crew of the Brimstone, Shax behaves like a demon, and let me tell you, Shax does not do things by halves when it comes to Ness.  I’m not implying that he loses all of the attributes that we have come to know and enjoy, but In Shax’s War, the demon we know is still there, but his vengeance is just supercharged

Bastian maintained consistency with the various character voices, recreating them accurately for this instalment while adding new voices to the mix, such as Leopold.  I did find that the overall production quality was good, although not as good as in the first two books, particularly in the second half where there were a few things that managed to briefly pull me out of the story.  Fortunately those were minor issues, and so I felt that the overall quality of the audio performance remained satisfying.

RATING:

BUY LINKS: 

Audible

 Amazon