3 stars
Perhaps this series would have been better wrapped up with the previous book. After all, once you've written the story about the central character, what's the point of continuing? And too, the purpose for this one feels more like a way of tying up loose ends, but it's done haphazardly.
The H... I kept picturing the reporter in Tim Burton's Batman (not Vickie Vale; the other one). He spends the first half of the book being an arse because mutants. We see a turnaround, but I'm not sure I believe it really.
The h... eh.
The background noise AKA the overarching plot is a conclusion on the whole "who's hunting them?" bit. Sortof. Because the people hunting them in the previous books aren't the ones hunting them now, but instead they're the H's mom's goons. Because of course. And of course, what better way to underscore that arsehole's initial attitude is wrong than to have mommy dearest give him the same treatment?
The real issue I had with this series in general is that it was all released over the course of a year or so, which means all the books were written entirely too close together for plot inconsistencies to occur. Book one had the H becoming a dick and getting locked away because he realized he had no freedom. Book two had the ones who went feral being hidden in a cage in a secret lab (even the secret lab has secret labs) and being "iced" if they went truly feral. Book 3 had the h with complete freedom to be a mercenary even though she's one of the experiments, and the ferals locked in cages on the level the H in book one was in, Book 4 was the outlier in that at the end of book 3, the lab was blown up so it took place at a house in the woods. Book five indicated that well, only the upper levels of the lab blew, and that a lot were left behind, locked in their cages to die. Strangely enough, that was never addressed after the H/h were collected and taken to that relic of a hotel the gang was hiding in.
And of course there's the bit where we have everyone being injected with all sorts of "natural" DNA, which explains one with wolf characteristics, one with lion characteristics, and one hyena. One could even sort of explain a mermaid - fish exist after all. But how do you get a phoenix? How do you get a unicorn? Demon/vampire/something or other? You kinda need an explanation there; things like that don't just appear out of nowhere.
And IS it over? It says "the end" at the end, but the tied ends are rather loose.