Day of Wrath

Look, if you've read the last three books, this is pretty much more of the same - only now with the door slammed firmly shut on any chance of learning who the Maess are, what they want, why they're attacking humanity. You know, the pesky little details that make up a good villain, enemy, sci-fi story or book in general.

I really, really liked the first book, found books 2-5 cheaper and bought them all together. Because I thought that the series would be better because the first book showed so much promise and the only reason I didn't give it 5 stars upon a reread was because I wanted to save it for later books in the series.

Yeah.

(And also a reminder why I shouldn't buy books without reading the previous one in the series.)

I don't know if this book is actually worse than the second and third ones (both which I rated 2 stars) or if I'm just fed up. (Though, to be fair, I would like to note that the last thirty or so pages is probably the best this series has turned out since Gyrfalcon.)

But this book is a culmination of disappointing sci-fi. The Maess are faceless, named only because that's what humans call them, and we, really, know nothing more of them at the end of the series than we did at the beginning. And you know the impetus for the big final battle? The Maess finally getting tired of playing with their food.

Taken all together, as a series, I do not feel it's a very good sci-fi series, beyond my personal preferences. There's no real resolution, the ending is disappointing in the extreme and I, truly, would rather have had this be book two and the rest of the series resolve the events that this book set up. (Then it would have been a fun sci-fi, though I'm not sure the author could do the idea justice, because I don't feel justice was done to the story we did get.)