Storyline: 3/5 
 Characters: 2/5 
 Writing Style: 3/5 
 World: 2/5 
 This is the kind of volume that prompts one to hold a grudge. You could just visualize Abraham and Franck agonizing over how to stretch this out. Because getting 9 books out of the series rather than writing good middle volumes was their concern, it was poor choice after poor choice after poor choice. 
 Those four different and revolving perspectives we've all loved thus far? They keep it, but they hamstring the technique by focusing on the four main characters from the previous books. The complicated personalities of our steadfast heroes? Corey bludgeons us with backstory and levels the nuance and enigma surrounding them. The big questions and big arc? Corey jettisons them in favor of a mid-series, unresolved, mini-drama. The sarcasm and wit of our favorites? It starts to bleed onto other voices making it uniformly saccharine. 
 To give them some credit, this was a fairly good thriller with escalating violence and action. It had more dumb decisions and incredible happenings than all of the previous books in the series combined, however. That is fine for a run-of-the-mill space opera, but this had been better than a run-of-the-mill space opera before that. I'm most bitter, I think, because I perceive the authors as basking in the limelight and taking their readers for granted. There were a lot of repetitive ideas and language in this book; one has to conclude that it was written and edited with much more haste and far less care. I'd rather they slow down and write well than churn out more unbelievable action sequences.