Review: Villains: Superpower Chronicles Book 4

Villains: Superpower Chronicles Book 4 by Arthur Mayor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I think the copy editing, which was shockingly bad in the earlier books, actually got a bit better in this one - though neither the author nor the editor he credits have run spellcheck, still.

Setting that aside, I like these books, because Ryan/Raven is a classic underdog. He doesn't have much in the way of superpowers, though it seems like his powers have got a bit better in this book (I don't remember his super-healing, though maybe that's me). He can't fly, he's not super-strong or invulnerable or anything useful like that, he can't fire energy beams or set things on fire. He learns physical actions really easily, so he's a parkour expert and martial artist, and he can (sometimes, unreliably) go into a subjective "slow time" mode which gives him more time to react to what's going on. That's it - except it isn't. His real superpower is that he's good at recruiting allies, even from among the villains; and he's really, really determined to do the right thing (protect the city and the people who live there), at any cost to himself, despite being comprehensively outmatched at every turn. He's also a decent detective, though that's mainly down to the allies thing.

At one point, he has what could easily have been the stupid Convenient Eavesdrop trope, except the author makes him earn his eavesdrop by deliberately hiding in a precarious position to overhear what he knows will be an informative meeting (which in turn enables him to be at another meeting to eavesdrop and allows him to save someone and recruit another ally). There are one or two small coincidences to advance the plot, but nothing too convenient.

Superhero fights form a large proportion of the book, again, and it was almost a little too much, again, but not quite. The action is varied, there's always more at stake than just "do they win the fight," and watching Raven improvise his way to another narrow victory is always entertaining. The author knows how to write an action plot, and the snarky narration is genuinely amusing.

His mess of a personal/family/school life is more in the background for this volume, though it's getting more and more entangled with his superhero life.

I came out of this one wanting to read the next, but I will still wait for the price to drop a bit. The normal price of the books is too high for the poor standard of copy editing.

View all my reviews