Book Review: The Gift of Fury

Disclaimers: I got this book when it was offered for free back in November. An earlier copy of this review appears under my real name in the Kindle Store.

If you're looking for urban fantasy with lots of action, and don't mind typos, this book is well-worth your time.

Price/Length: 99¢ (US of course) / 68,000 words

Synopsis: Count Albritton (“Count” is his name, not his title — he’s sensitive about that), a self-styled paranormal investigator, is looking into an attempted burglary at the NYC apartment of one of his sorcerer friends. It doesn’t take long for this seemingly routine investigation to turn into a battle for the future of the world and trip into his own past.

Storytelling: five stars. I’m not a fan of clichés like “can't put it down,” but that was almost how it was for me. I kept picking up my Kindle at odd moments during the day to take in a couple chapters. When my battery got low, I pulled it onto an iPad and finished reading. Lots of action and no long stretches of boredom to counter it. Sexual tension is present, not only between Count and his “guardian angel” Kara, but between himself and the vampiric Nerva as well — but no explicit sex scenes for those who are offended by such. Character development was okay, we learn more about each of them as we go, but the villain was just a little too two-dimensional.

Writing: four stars. If you are put off by a story told in first-person present tense, that’s what this is. I didn’t notice until I was a few chapters in, though. About a third of the story is a flashback to events that happened before (the story begins with Albritton in a hospital, recovering from various injuries from those events) -- that was a little gimmicky, but the story itself was strong enough to overcome it.

Editing: three stars. No glaring continuity errors that I saw, the story itself holds together very well. There are far too many copyediting problems though: dropped words, typos, and so on. That cost the book a five-star rating overall. I hope a second edition, and any sequels, addresses this issue.

You can’t go too far wrong for 99¢ unless you just can’t turn off your internal editor. I hope the second book comes out soon, and Jackson splurges for a copyeditor.