∎ Download Gratis Red Angel Book I Smugglers Red Angel Series 1 eBook C R Daems

Red Angel Book I Smugglers Red Angel Series 1 eBook C R Daems

Download As PDF : Red Angel Book I Smugglers Red Angel Series 1 eBook C R Daems

Red Angel Book I Smugglers Red Angel Series 1 eBook C R Daems

If you haven't read the Riss, series, you might like this more. There's nothing _wrong_ with the book, but the way Riss #6 ended, I expected there to be more of them. That's not the case at all. If you think of this more as a prequel(-ish) or haven't read the Riss stories at all, you might enjoy it more. I've read a lot of C.R. Daems' books, and this is the only one that I was disappointed in. That might have been half my expectations, because he followed his usual formula (no complaints there! It's nice to see a male author who can write female characters well) so.. YMMV. But I was disappointed.


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Red Angel Book I Smugglers Red Angel Series 1 eBook C R Daems Reviews

I couldn't finish this book, I think I made it to the 10-15% mark and I couldn't take it anymore. Everything was contrived to make Anna into a victim, and some of those instances were just nonsensical. In the beginning, 3 older boys at a group home attack her, bust her nose, leave bruises all over her and she gets blamed for her snake biting them as they accuse her of being the attacker. The caretaker and the police officer don't even question her about the event despite her obvious injuries. It was completely unbelievable and contrived.

There was nothing in the way of character development either. In the span of a couple of chapters we fast forward from 6 years old to 9 years old to 11-12 years old. All we really know about her is she's quiet, respectful, and studious. We don't know what her dreams are, we don't know if she has a favorite subject, or even a preferred food. We don't know any of the customs in her world. We know next to nothing.
I generally enjoyed this book, and this series. It's got good pacing, storyline, and grammar. However, I only recommend it for people who like Sherlock Holmes stories and antique cryptography, yet are willing to tolerate some internal inconsistencies.

The protagonist, Anna, is very intelligent, and has an unusual set of
personal challenges. However, she often seems cold and unfeeling. The
writing tends to "tell" us about her emotions, instead of "showing" them.
So we don't "feel" them with her. Even when some truly awful things
happen to her, she barely reacts and has no signs of PTSD. This is
discussed in the story, where other characters also find her unemotional.

These stories are primarily mysteries. She tracks criminals primarily
through decoding encrypted messages. This makes them puzzle mysteries.

However, they are flawed mysteries based on imprecise puzzles. They don't
give you enough information to solve it yourself. The puzzles have
internal inconsistencies. The situation has unbelievable elements that
would invalidate her methods.

A good mystery should show you all the evidence, give you a chance to
solve it yourself, then be impressed by the fictional detective's
deductions. Instead, Anna often "solves" problems by jumping to
conclusions that happen to be correct.

A big problem is the scale is far too small. It's not remotely believable
that the economy of an 15 solar system nation could be supported by a few
hundred merchant ships, sending only a few hundred telegram-like "WaveCom"
messages per week. In 2017, our one planet had around 52,000 commercial
ships. In the 1960s and '70s, the United Kingdom alone delivered about
27,000 telegrams per day. Anna, and her agents, would never have been able
to personally inspect and find the handful of relevant messages in any
reasonable message set. However, computerized message searches are never
even mentioned. It's also absurd that the Naval Intelligence Agency would
not have information sources in the other two interstellar nations (even
about commercial ship registry).

The puzzles are often flawed. Math puzzles, like decryption, are always
very detail oriented; one character can completely change the meaning.
However, the puzzles in these books have not been properly proof read. For
example, in the fourth book, she tells her programmer to encode abductions
in the form "Black Water,5,2/10-20/425". That somehow meant "a woman from
Black Water with an abduction window from the fourth month tenth day
through the twentieth, identified by the number five, abducted in the four
hundred twenty-fifth year by the official Eastar Calendar". I guess "2" is
supposed to mean "fourth month"? I hope the author will fix this error,
and the other puzzles, and re-upload the books.

That example shows the author does not know anything about ciphers,
databases, nor data normalization. The combined single key above is
something I would expect to see in databases from 30 years ago, not
thousands of years in the future. Even worse, they assigned a unique key
number to each abduction, then redundantly included it in the key string.

The basic assumptions of the scifi world are not explained, and don't seem
to be consistent. There seem to be a few different FTL technologies
"wave", "jump", and "step". The difference is never explained, nor their
costs and advantages. The "internet" seems to be at times a local
(per-planet) system, and an interplanetary one.
There are several things that put this book a cut above most others in the genre. For starters, it's refreshing to have a female protagonist, and even more refreshing when they succeed more by out-thinking the bad guys than by out-punching and out-shooting them. Not that there aren't enough fights to keep things exciting, but those are really side details to the central storyline. Another feature I love is that the story isn't about saving all humanity from extinction--a theme that has become so commonplace as to become boring. These characters are playing for big stakes, but it's more of a whodunit than a survival marathon. The main characters are well developed. They have hopes and fears, not all of them predictable, just like everybody I know. I can believe they're real; I feel I may have met a few of them at some point.
But I think my favorite thing about this book is what is not written. From the start, this first-person narrative doesn't explain things. It shows things as they happen and the reader gets to figure a lot of things out from those clues. Some things are never fully explained (as least not in this book). We may never know where Red came from and why he's so unusual. It's enough that he is here and does what he does. I'm hoping in some future installment we will learn more about Red, but I'm positive that won't happen until those details are relevant to the plot. For the most part the wonders of interstellar travel, space ships and weapons, even the history of the planets and societies involved, are simply mentioned in passing as they need to be. There are no lessons in imaginary (and, really, irrelevant) history or sociology or engineering. Space ships travel in "the wave", which we eventually gather is much like the hyperspace of generations past, but we don't have to sit through a lecture of made-up physics, it's just another thing that happens as the characters travel around. We learn what's important about wave technology only in bits and pieces as it becomes relevant. Eventually "old earth" is mentioned, but only as a passing comment in conversation--we're not going to hear more about how many years (and light years) these planets are from our world, unless it becomes important to the story. It's as if we've just magically been transported into this different world, and we figure out how things work as we go, and that's a fun adventure all by itself.

I'm reminded of the old masters of sci-fi, particularly my personal favorite Isaac Azimov and his puzzle solving heroes who succeed by figuring things out. So if you're looking for some well written story set in a star-traveling culture, but something different from a lot of what's out there now, you're going to love this book.
If you haven't read the Riss, series, you might like this more. There's nothing _wrong_ with the book, but the way Riss #6 ended, I expected there to be more of them. That's not the case at all. If you think of this more as a prequel(-ish) or haven't read the Riss stories at all, you might enjoy it more. I've read a lot of C.R. Daems' books, and this is the only one that I was disappointed in. That might have been half my expectations, because he followed his usual formula (no complaints there! It's nice to see a male author who can write female characters well) so.. YMMV. But I was disappointed.