Moment of Truth by Michael PryorMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
The heroes have spent four books attempting to prevent the start of Not-WWI, but they've failed, and it looks like the villain, Doctor Tremaine, will get the massive number of deaths he needs in order to cast an immortality spell.
Naturally, Aubrey and his trusty sidekick George enlist, and naturally they're selected for special training, and naturally they're sent off on a dangerous mission along with Aubrey's love interest, the highly competent Caroline (despite all being only 18 and having had minimal training), and naturally they bump into pretty much every other significant character by sheer outright coincidence, which is one of my big gripes with this series.
The other big gripe is that it isn't polished to the standard it ought to be, considering it's from an experienced author and a major publisher, as I've mentioned in all my other reviews for the series. There are a number of places where the wording of a sentence isn't quite right, or a word is missing, and there are a couple of errors the author makes consistently that a copy editor ought to have fixed, particularly "may" in past tense where it should be "might". I noticed a common error in this volume that I hadn't seen so often in previous ones: the omission of "had" (the past perfect tense) when referring to events before the narrative moment. There are also continuity errors, like golems being unable to do anything but simple repetitive tasks when in previous books golems have successfully impersonated important people, and errors like an airship headed for Europe from Not-England heading to the west.
There is lots of varied action and creative magic, although since the Laws of Magic are never really defined or fully enumerated, magic can do anything the author needs it to in order to solve whatever problem Aubrey is facing. There's an apparent contradiction in this volume, in that Aubrey is unable to cast any spells because he's gagged, but Tremaine casts a spell with a gesture and no words; perhaps Tremaine is able to do that and Aubrey isn't, but if so, that isn't remarked on or explored at all.
The end of the fourth book seemed to promise some progress at last in the Aubrey-Caroline romance, but that seems to have been retconned back to status quo here, and Aubrey just keeps pining and admiring everything (everything!) Caroline does, no matter how minor.
There's briefly another woman in the picture, who looks as if she'll be a rival to Caroline, but no; in one of the few plot twists I didn't see coming from a mile off, (view spoiler). In my review of the previous book, I wasn't sure whether I could see the twists coming because I remembered them unconsciously from reading it more than 10 years before, or whether they were just obvious. I haven't read this volume before, so that gives me the answer: they're obvious, though not to the supposedly brilliant Aubrey.
Buried under this large accumulation of small infelicities is a good action-packed pulp adventure with appealing characters and well-phrased flashes of humour (though the occasional puns aren't even good enough to be bad). I just wish the author and publisher had put in more work to dig it out.
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