Review: War Games by Daniel May (The Hanged Men #2)

War Games by Daniel May

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Horse rating: -5 of 7 horses*

DNF at 20%

This was, quite honestly, unreadable.

Why use 3 word when 300 do the trick?

There is no tangible emotion here. Any point where there should be emotion, or might start to be emotion, is immediately drowned in flowery pointless prose. The over the top descriptors make all the feelings abstract and unreal.

Not everything needs a metaphor, but they sure do get them. There’s no sense of importance in this book, because absolutely everything is given three or more paragraphs of fanciful description. Simple scenes last for pages upon pages. A scene where Nerva walks into his room, gets a small bag, and leaves earns 3+ paragraphs of room decor description. Why? His room isn’t important at all. This interrupts any action or flow in the book.

This ruins the tension, where there might be some, as well. Like the Tense Reveal Scene - well, it should be tense, but I was distracted by a passing irrelevant freight train being described as a dragon so it was generally uninteresting.

This book desperately needs to focus. The descriptions are so long that sometimes I don’t remember what I was reading about to start with.


Who is even in this book:

The characters are strangely absent from themselves, like shells of a person. Nerva is a whiny brat who I do not at all believe can run a lemonade stand, let alone a mafia. The whole first chapter is him being self-loathing, I think. My eyes glazed over after he complained about doing coke under a stuffed cow head. It’s just a pile of words, again, that don’t evoke any actual emotions for me.

Pascal is …muscle? I don’t know. Also he has eyes. And an ominous nose.


Miscellany:

I hadn’t run into any actual mafia stuff by the time I quit, though that sometimes takes a bit to get started in mafia books so I’ll ignore that.

Stop using the word bitch/bitchy. Find a new word.

There was one paragraph of tension and interesting and it was about a horse. Immediately returned to nothing once we stopped talking about the mysterious horse.

I’ve got more in my highlights (my review on Goodreads is linked below), but here’s two bonus quotes anyway:

He was filial enough to come pay his respects in this charnel house, but no longer stupid enough to hope.

It’s really tasteless to refer to an assisted living home as a charnel house. What the hell.

He had thick white brows, clenched together currently in a decisive consternation.

ok BQ Hanson

Overall, this is in dire need of editing. I’m not sure what happened in between Blood Sports and this, but damn, what a downgrade. The romance was weak to absent in Blood Sports, but at least the characters had a personality. This is just a mess.

*This book gets -5 of 7 horses rating because it was very displeasing, the lack of horse. Sure, maybe there's some later, but since I only got one tiny paragraph about horse, it was offensive to my delicate sensibilities. The first book I enjoyed due to the heavy murder horse content. Since one of the MCs is a giant babby about horses, it was not looking good. Therefore, it gets the exact opposite of a perfect rating. 


War Games on Amazon

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