Review: The Crack in the Crystal

The Crack in the Crystal by Barak Engel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

D&D-inspired (the characters are based on the party in a game that the author runs), but not simply D&D; there's no question of copyright issues. While the characters' classes are recognizable - sorcerer, rogue, ranger/druid, bard - their abilities aren't from a template common in their world, but are unusual and specific to them.

Because it doesn't simply follow a D&D game, but is a story created from scratch, it has more depth and coherence than you might otherwise expect, and the twist ending adequately accounts for the coincidences that are needed to make it work. The characters grow and change at least a little, their relationships develop, and the plot makes for a satisfying arc.

What it isn't is a heist. It starts out looking as if the characters are being assembled as a heist crew, but... they're not, and the heistlike parts at the beginning are rudimentary, and we're soon on to something else. I like heists, so this was a bit of a disappointment, but it's not like the quest/investigation plot that it turned into wasn't enjoyable.

Much of the prose is well edited; the author avoids several common mistakes, in fact. The main exception is that the past perfect tense is frequently missing. This was a constant irritation to me, because of the temporal whiplash of the narrative in simple past tense continuing to use simple past tense when it referred to events earlier in the past (prior to the narrative moment). I read a pre-publication version via Netgalley, so there is some chance that a good editor will fix this before publication, though honestly I would be a bit surprised if that happens. That's a big part of what kept the story from rising to the Silver tier of my annual recommendation list, though it's solidly in Bronze. This is a promising author, and I hope he learns to use the past perfect more consistently before writing a sequel, because I'd like to read it.

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