The Last Days

I’ve read two other books in this series, and they’ve been amazing. This one was…less so.

It reminded me of The Phantom Menace, which was a Star Wars movie that was more about political maneuvering than anything else. Someone said “it was like watching C-SPAN in space.”

Same thing here. It starts off with an action scene which wasn’t as good as the last novel, then kind of drifted into a political story. Jon Bennett – our hero – is trying to negotiate a peace between Israel and Palestine, and everything goes off the rails, as you would expect.

But the pace just crawls. At one point – and I’m not kidding here – the author prints the entire text of the proposed Middle East peace agreement (like, every article and section) and then dramatizes the reactions to it.

I just didn’t get it. I’m still high on the series as a whole, and I hear the next novel is really good. But this one was a letdown.