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Sentinel #1
Masked
Not everyone's first day at work ends with them fighting a gorilla man in a sea of corpses ...unless you're Tyrone Sy.
As one of WestScarlet's newest Sabres, Tyrone wants to use his role as a Sabre to be a hero, but he'll have to get past this first mission.
It was a simple mission. So simple, even rookies like Tyrone and his team could do it. Write a report on a series of wild animal attacks in four small, remote towns.
It's probably just the fever dreams of a few overexcited people, right?
When the team encounter dangerous enemies and the tail-end of a massacre, they'll have to dig deep if they are to survive their very first mission and stop the dying before there's no one left.
The terrorist organisation Masquerade has control of the beast masks and has infiltrated the government. With the enigmatic Caine as their leader, and the ferocious Jack as their most powerful enforcer, will even the Sabres fall before them?
The answers to WestScarlet's troubles lie in the city of Draekeor. For Tyrone, they may hit a little too close to home.
As one of WestScarlet's newest Sabres, Tyrone wants to use his role as a Sabre to be a hero, but he'll have to get past this first mission.
It was a simple mission. So simple, even rookies like Tyrone and his team could do it. Write a report on a series of wild animal attacks in four small, remote towns.
It's probably just the fever dreams of a few overexcited people, right?
When the team encounter dangerous enemies and the tail-end of a massacre, they'll have to dig deep if they are to survive their very first mission and stop the dying before there's no one left.
The terrorist organisation Masquerade has control of the beast masks and has infiltrated the government. With the enigmatic Caine as their leader, and the ferocious Jack as their most powerful enforcer, will even the Sabres fall before them?
The answers to WestScarlet's troubles lie in the city of Draekeor. For Tyrone, they may hit a little too close to home.
292 pages, ebook
Published October 23, 2018
3 people are currently reading
11 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 30, 2019
Great characters each with their own unique personalities and powers. In this world, there lurks extremely powerful and mysterious villains that almost seem unbeatable with their hidden agendas. What Masked does really well, is portray the villains as tragic characters, betrayed by the forces that were meant to save them and entrapped into a contract with the mastermind such that they are brainwashed and forced to fight against the Sabres. Each character is carefully crafted to give real depth and emotion to this amazing novel.
May 12, 2019
This book isn't a participant in the 2018 spfbo contest, it's a separate work from the same author.
Who says that really, really bad reviews stirs readers away? In my case, it actually made me want to read the book to see if the bad press is true or not.
I did struggle with this book and it's mostly because I am a reader that loves interesting characters in my stories. I am more of a noblebright enthusiast, but I also enjoy books with villanous protagonists if the character is very well developed and the motives interesting.
One thing that struck from this book are two things related to the characters of the story:
1) The villains are far more interesting. The best characters being Rocky and to a lesser degree, Beth. The Sabers are all flat and I was totally incapable of rooting for them.
2) The interesting characters don't appear until around the 50% point of the novel.
Readers are fickle, and if you can't draw them in within the first 15 pages, then something is clearly wrong. I tend to read through entire books, even really poorly written ones and on occasion have found a lot of good merits halfway through. But most readers will simply swipe a different book even faster than they'd change the tv channel. There is a trend I have noticed personally: the vast majority of books I grant 5 stars literally sucked me in within the 15 page limit. And usually it's because the characters are tangible and interesting. A weakness of this novel is that you aren't given even a physical description of the characters, and when they introduce 8 characters right at the same time and don't really offer any variance in their personalities, you lose the brief attention span of the reader forever.
The basic plot premise was interesting. I liked the idea of a team of disgruntled youths forming a criminal organization known as Masquerade where their dormant magic is artifically enhanced with animal masks that can't be removed from their bodies unless they perish. Once again, I emphatize that the villains of this book were tempting to root for just because they add a fun factor that is lacking from the sabers.
One thing that I never really understood about the novel was the fact that half of the sabers assigned to hunt down the bad guys were rookies that were supposed to perform a very simple task for their final Saber school exam, and end up bumping into a series of towns filled with desecrated bodies and as expected, they handled the situation very poorly due to their inexperience. Instead of relegating them to boring paperwork (with all of the plot potential from the tension of knowing madmen are out there while their talents are wasted), they are sent to the frontline. I know that Caine attacked their HQ and killed a lot of personnel, but he spared all of the higher ranking Sabers. What could possibly go wrong when you send a bunch of hothead rookies to clean up a mess that should be only for the big shots?
Some chapters were pretty entertaining, I liked Rocky's back story, which surely upped my rating of the book. Caine was also rather interesting even though the book never explains what he looks like when he isn't wearing a mask. All in all, the book has quite some good merits, but you have to pretty much slog through the weaker first 50% of the book to get there. Still, the better chapters of the book made it sufficiently worthy of a 3 star read.
Who says that really, really bad reviews stirs readers away? In my case, it actually made me want to read the book to see if the bad press is true or not.
I did struggle with this book and it's mostly because I am a reader that loves interesting characters in my stories. I am more of a noblebright enthusiast, but I also enjoy books with villanous protagonists if the character is very well developed and the motives interesting.
One thing that struck from this book are two things related to the characters of the story:
1) The villains are far more interesting. The best characters being Rocky and to a lesser degree, Beth. The Sabers are all flat and I was totally incapable of rooting for them.
2) The interesting characters don't appear until around the 50% point of the novel.
Readers are fickle, and if you can't draw them in within the first 15 pages, then something is clearly wrong. I tend to read through entire books, even really poorly written ones and on occasion have found a lot of good merits halfway through. But most readers will simply swipe a different book even faster than they'd change the tv channel. There is a trend I have noticed personally: the vast majority of books I grant 5 stars literally sucked me in within the 15 page limit. And usually it's because the characters are tangible and interesting. A weakness of this novel is that you aren't given even a physical description of the characters, and when they introduce 8 characters right at the same time and don't really offer any variance in their personalities, you lose the brief attention span of the reader forever.
The basic plot premise was interesting. I liked the idea of a team of disgruntled youths forming a criminal organization known as Masquerade where their dormant magic is artifically enhanced with animal masks that can't be removed from their bodies unless they perish. Once again, I emphatize that the villains of this book were tempting to root for just because they add a fun factor that is lacking from the sabers.
One thing that I never really understood about the novel was the fact that half of the sabers assigned to hunt down the bad guys were rookies that were supposed to perform a very simple task for their final Saber school exam, and end up bumping into a series of towns filled with desecrated bodies and as expected, they handled the situation very poorly due to their inexperience. Instead of relegating them to boring paperwork (with all of the plot potential from the tension of knowing madmen are out there while their talents are wasted), they are sent to the frontline. I know that Caine attacked their HQ and killed a lot of personnel, but he spared all of the higher ranking Sabers. What could possibly go wrong when you send a bunch of hothead rookies to clean up a mess that should be only for the big shots?
Some chapters were pretty entertaining, I liked Rocky's back story, which surely upped my rating of the book. Caine was also rather interesting even though the book never explains what he looks like when he isn't wearing a mask. All in all, the book has quite some good merits, but you have to pretty much slog through the weaker first 50% of the book to get there. Still, the better chapters of the book made it sufficiently worthy of a 3 star read.
November 18, 2018
If you are a fan of Dragon Ball Z or other battle-filled Japanese cartoons, you might enjoy this. From the cover you might expect this to be a comic book -- and no doubt that would have worked better. Comic readers would enjoy the host of two-dimensional characters rushing in and out of the story, throwing spectacular magical spells, rushing back and fore without really getting anywhere. The prose is clear and simple, without mistakes, but the book lacks characters you can care about, or even just a dash of humour, and if you plough through to the end, the story doesn't come to a rewarding resolution, but instead leads on to the next book in the series.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews