I don’t generally like stories about the mob, but the comparison to Dungeon Crawler Carl, and the Soundbooth Theater production, made me overlook everything else. Keep in mind that I’ve stopped listening halfway through chapter 2.
I’m rating it based on how I feel about it. If you love gritty noir mob stories with guns, fast cars, a whole buncha macho tough guys, and deck magic, you’ll disagree with my rating.
At some point I might push forward (can’t return it since I bought it on sale, without using a credit). But the first 45 minutes had so many things I dislike with the style/tone/content, probably not.
The quality of the writing is good so far. Narration by Soundbooth is also good, though it took me a minute to figure out the fancy “AI noise-canceling” tech in my headphones was trying to mute the club music at the start of the audiobook, which made the voices choppy.
Here’s the reasons I stopped listening:
> The few female characters are unlikeable. They’re drunk or whiny or aggressive.
> All male characters are unlikeable. They’re rude, whiny, spoiled, violent, threatening, or aggressive.
> The main character, Ethan Wolfe, is emotionally distanced from the reader by an omniscient narrator. We are told how he looks, how people are afraid of him or jealous of him or condescending to him, how loyal he is to his boss, but I couldn’t connect with him. It did seem consistent with gritty noir, though, if that’s your bag.
> The story opens in the middle of a card game going on at a club and introduces way too many people at once.
> Multiple smokers in my family have died of lung cancer. Having the main character be a frequent on-page smoker was the final straw for me.
FYI: Dungeon Crawler Carl is the only LitRPG to make me cry, rage, and laugh out loud, multiple times. Carl and Princess, and Matt Dinniman and Jeff Hays, are amazing. Highly recommend. As mentioned above I’m anti-smoking, and Carl also smoked. Difference being: It was not central to the story, Princess hated the habit, and once he ran out of his one pack, he couldn’t get more for several books in the series. Once he *did* get more, he gave it up for the cat.