The Book of Joe

So Book 5 follows immediately after the events of Book 4, with Talker having jumped off a bridge to try and save Sgt Joe, and in doing so this book goes from being the usual entertainment of Rangers beating the crap out of every nasty fantasy beasty and morphs into to a pair of competent killers running for their lives from a whole bunch of nasty. I honestly wasn’t sure if it would work, me having gotten used to large-scale battles between a small army of the hardest individuals imaginable and every fairytale villain that could be dredged from the D&D playbook. However, it did work. It worked very well. This book carried the same level of pacing that has kept me glued to this series but managed to thread in a more nuanced narrative than usual. A fantastic addition to the series.

Trying to describe the story without giving anything away is proving pretty hard, so I’m going to keep this review short. First off, Sgt Joe is awesome, and I mean, AWESOME. He’s not just a hard-arse killer but an exemplar of all the Ranger ideals that we’ve been shown over the past four books. Every situation is an opportunity for Joe to teach Talker something new, even when they are getting peppered with poison arrows or clambering their way through a sandstorm. The portrayal of Sgt Joe is that of a consummate professional and a genuinely good man, one of the few examples I have ever seen of what is in essence a perfect leader. He is an entirely believable character who is portrayed as being as human as anyone else, and not some uber-soldier. Joe is just a virtuoso at what he does, and what he does is trying his damnedest to get his men (or single man in this case) home alive. A truly great character.

We also finally get a good glimpse of one of the other factions in the Ruin that we’ve been told about but have not had so much of a narrative whiff of yet. I won’t say who as it’s a spoiler, but I was very happy to get a bit more of a grip on some of the wider aspects of this world. My biggest problem with this series is the lack of fluff. I want the backstories, lore, and what some people might find pace-slowing info dumps from the vast array of awesome fantasy peoples and races that Anspach and Cole have crafted here, but usually such nerd-fodder is sacrificed on the hallowed alter of constant action. Here we finally get a bit of it. Not as much as I’d like, but I’ll take my geek fix wherever I can.

I still feel like this book and the last could have been wrapped up as a single novel. Some of the books in this series are just a little too short for my liking, and if I weren’t so hooked on this universe, I’m not too sure that each on their own would be worth the Audible credit they cost when there are other books that are two, three, four times the length; although they will likely lack in the pacing department compared to these non-stop adrenaline-fests. However, this does bring me on to one gripe I had with this book. We often get the little after-action reports post-book where we hear from the authors and the various real-life Rangers that they use for research. They are fun little bits that I very much enjoy. But, the last 2 hours of this audiobook’s runtime are constituted of this (plus a short into to another book). That’s nearly 20% of the advertised runtime. That’s 2 hours of story that I desperately wanted and was expecting that I didn’t get. Kind of put a damper on the whole thing at the end there. But aside from that, another great book by Cole and Anspach.

As for narration, once again Christopher Ryan Grant was great. I keep forgetting the range that he has because the majority of the speaking characters are all US Rangers, so every time he gets the opportunity to try someone very different, it’s always a pleasure to hear.

Personal Score: 4.0 stars

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