3 stars. An absolutely thrilling, breath-taking adventure that is hurt by slightly uneven pacing but particularly some of the worst editing I have ever seen.
**MILD SPOILERS**
Artinian starts off the 3rd book of his 'Safe Haven' series with an absolute bang and doesn't let up until the final page. Seriously, the first few pages will just have you clapping in admiration and certainly made me glad that I put down book 2 and started book 3 without a break! Just considering the plot and characterizations, this 3rd chapter is an absolute thrill that will keep you up to the wee hours of the morning just so you can find out what happens.
As with Book 2, the best part(s) of the story are the characterizations - people we love or hate at this point - and the no-apologies approach of 'we will do what it takes so that our loved ones survive!' If you love this genre or even want to break away from something like your usual military action books, you can do a lot worse than this book or this series! I still think the best compliment I can give is that I want to continue with the series and later today will be downloading book 4 for immediate consumption!
Having said that, this also means that in the places where the action or tension wavers at all, the story stutters somewhat. I realize that a tale of this magnitude needs new characters to add to the current roster or even replenish it if you will, and for the most part this is handled very well, if not a little too conveniently (I've been to Inverness many times, finding someone that quick in that city would NOT be easy!). However, this also meant that we get a bit 'cliché-y' with our new players, mostly it seems to just be able to skip a lot of their character building (we know how the Irish are, don't we, ergo... and viola, here's Jules and her brothers). Ditto for scenes that are now getting repetitive (really guys, you didn't suspect yet that the school was full of dead kids and others, even with the meeting signs?) or that need a quicker resolution (we needed Shaw and Lucy to be buddies again, so we just get an aside that he helped her quit her drug addiction... moving on, right?). A few more pages in any of these situations to have worked out something more original (maybe have all the kid zombies trapped on the... PLAYGROUND FROM HELL!!!) or let us get to know people would have helped.
Another place that the overall story suffers is the often abrupt (impatient?) end to some key players, scenes that could have been developed much more richly (see my comments for book 2 where Joseph's end, however expected, went by far too abruptly). Take, for example, the Don's demise. This was handled really well and was built up to a proper crescendo - and I could say the same for Juliet and the Don's daughter, too (sorry, I should look up her name because my brain kept calling her Ivanka). On the other hand, Grandma Sue just... dies? The whole reason we were running in Books 1 & 2 and that's it? Sure, there's the big reveal leading up to it but surely she could have wandered out to the shore to reflect a bit first? Just seems anti-climatic to snuff it in her sofa chair...
And after all of the descent into madness of Ray - probably the most truly and deliciously horrific part of the book (despite the again clichéd red-headed Glaswegian stuff) - he is killed with one quick swing of the machete? Surely we could have had his new 'persona' (the bad human is now a bad zombie!!!!) get in a few more nasty snarls and near-misses before he was dispatched, no? I mean, cut him in half and let the top half continue to fight and so on, until only a cursed finger prevails? Oh well, I guess that's a bit nit-picky as that was indeed a fantastic battle scene all around, particularly as I've toured that region of Scotland and could just imagine it taking place exactly as described! Oh and the wee trebuchets (or whatever you called them) were a great and very original approach, well done!
Alas... despite loving the story, I was repeatedly distracted by the editing in this book. It is horrible, full stop. I have literally never seen so many punctuation mistakes in a professionally published book. Ever. There are also scores of formatting errors and some grammar hiccups that should not be tolerated and I can't imagine these were solely the fault of the author (if at all). Folks there are programs out there that would have picked up on MOST of these mistakes if not all of them!!!
I don't know if I got my version from a bad batch of Kindle copies or what, but someone needs to review the performance of the entire team here. I hope Book 4 is better because that was just cringe-worthy to someone who did something DISTANTLY related to editing as a job for many years (mistakes would have caused chemical plant explosions in my job, so I appreciate good editing). And no, you may not contact me for examples unless you are willing to pay for my time (yes, this has happened before). Seriously, this book, this author and all readers deserve better.