Brutal Asset

After reading God Touched I was hooked and couldn’t stop reading. This is really good entertainment, BUT after devouring the first three installments I felt a little full and fed up. Here’s why.

The story is any young or young-at-heart geek’s wet dream: a lonely young man who lost his family early has a special gift/curse. He can sense, fight and banish demons. For years he has waged a lonely war with only his grandfather as a friend. Then he stumbles on vampires, werewolves and a whole new world. Most of all he encounters a fabulously beautiful and deadly vampire princess. And the action just increases…

In this third installment our hero is using his deadly new powers working with a covert government branch and of course encounters new terrible enemies. The story is written in the first person – which I always enjoy – and the hero is a likable humble guy with really bad-ass powers and a cool gang of top vampire friends. Everyone is superbad, supercool and the action raw and vicious. In short, urban action fantasy on steroids.

Why I got a bit jaded after the first three installments is partly that there is little originality (standard vampire/were urban fantasy) and that the darker tint in the first novel got lost in all the action and superbadass characters. It became a bit too much “teenage video game” for me. As a comparison the Hellequin Chronicles are more original and fascinating in their world-building and darkness.

However, after a pause I have now picked up number four and I have to say that Mr. Conroe sure can whip up some really great, fast-paced entertainment. If you can identify with the outsider who always wanted to be someone special and like cool urban fantasy with plenty of action then you won’t be disappointed.

Conroe appears to be backing off from his tendency in the first two books in this series of product placement. He expended too much ink on describing the brand names of nearly everything that every character was wearing, eating, using as a weapon or brushing their teeth with. Thank goodness he decided to spend more time developing his characters and the relationships therein.

Conroe does kind of fall into what has become a fairly common story arc these days of the government adopting a paranoid stance towards things/people not under their control. There are some stereotypical players such as the over-zealous director of a mysterious government agency, the military general who knows better than anyone else, government officials with nebulous backgrounds, a fairly clueless and arrogant president, the computer wiz/geek/best bud of the hero, etc.

When all is said and done, however, it’s a page-turner and a fun read. On to book four!

I was looking for something similar to Jim Butcher’s “Dresden Files” series and ended up reading the first 4 books of this series => I will post this same review for all 4 of them.

I enjoyed a lot the first 3 books – a steady pace, some romance but never overdoing it, a lot of action and some interesting concepts & names & informations => 5 stars and I think I might read them again in the future.
For my taste they’re not as detailed and funny and creative as Jim Butcher’s series, but still, they were quite light (although I get crazy when the 2 main characters are separated) and enjoyable.

I quite liked the first half of the 4th book (mainly when the main chars were doing their job as “rovers” in the wilderness), but then things started going downhill: some of the vampires were quite stupid, the main character still had his personality problems, there were a lot of open questions and the book itself was open-ended.

Therefore, 5 stars for the first 3 books (you could read only those ones and then stop), but only 3 stars to the fourth mostly because of the bad 2nd half and the bad & open-ended ending.
For the time being I’m taking a break from these series.

It’s possible that John Conroe’s ”

Brutal Asset (The Demon Accords Book 3)

” is just a tad better than the previous two books in the series (call it 3-3/4 stars instead of 3-1/2). It feels like he might have slightly toned down the gland-fest a bit and reduced the number of fights the protagonist breezes through from dozens to a handful or so. All my previous comments about the earlier books apply. So, if you’ve read those books and are looking at this one, you know exactly what to expect. Again, I wish Conroe would flesh-out and mature his characters some more since he’s obviously a good writer with some nice ideas. Plus, maybe I wouldn’t feel so guilty over enjoying the books. Officially, I’m rating the book at a Very Good 4 stars out of 5. If I could do fractions, I’d drop it a quarter or half a star.

To me, Brutal Asset is when Conroe truly hits his stride. Where God Touched and Demon Driven had Chris as an untouchable force, BA proves that even he has his limits. It’s also where Conroe starts to lay the seeds of several long-term plotlines. To be fair, some of them have been referenced prior to this book, but when I look at the later books, it’s clear to me that Brutal Asset is a turning point. If the Demon Accords was ever going to become a long-running series, some things would have to change. Not every author could do that, but Conroe certainly did. Buckle in, because this is where the Demon Accords really begins.

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