Rating: 
Summary: Not the quality I expected from Christopher Golden
Review: Usually I zip through his books, but this one took a few weeks to finish. It didn't really interest me until I was a little more than half way through it. As usual his dialogue and understanding of the characters is right on the mark, but the story had way to many minor characters to keep track of. In my opinion to much action and not enough character interaction.
Rating:
Summary: Not the quality I expected from Christopher Golden
Review: Usually I zip through his books, but this one took a few weeks to finish. It didn't really interest me until I was a little more than half way through it. As usual his dialogue and understanding of the characters is right on the mark, but the story had way to many minor characters to keep track of. In my opinion to much action and not enough character interaction.
Rating: 
Summary: golden at his best
Review: when people are turning up mutilated on the docks, buffy goes down to investigate. what she finds is really horrible. a man in
a bar turns into a hideous sea creature and kills half the people
in the bar before buffy eventually kills him. while this is bad
enough, there is another group of sea monsters in town who are
also on a killing spree. things are really looking bad when buffy
and giles get a visit from the council of watchers. buffy refuses
to have anything to do with them so they figure out a way to get
faith out of prison for a short period of time. time is running
out for buffy when one of the scooby gang gets infected and it
looks as if she might have to swallow her pride and ask the
council for their help. this book will have you on edge from
beginning to end and it is one of the better buffy books.
Rating:
Summary: The Wisdom of Chris
Review: Wow I couldnt put the book down, this is one of the best Buffy books written so far. The story line is amazing.
Rating:
Summary: Golden brings Lovecraftian horror into the Buffy Universe
Review: You might think at first that Christopher Golden is doing some riff off of tacky 1950s black & white science fiction movies in "The Wisdom of War," but that is not the case. Golden is going for one of the mother lodes of supernatural horror in American literature, namely the work of H. P. Lovecraft (I kept waiting for somebody to quote the "Necromonican" at some point in this novel). Even if "The Wisdom of War" fails to explicitly merge with the Cthulhu Mythos, Golden's epic battle involving eldritch forces is certainly in the spirit of Lovecraft's best work ("At the Mountains of Madness" was always my personal favorite).Golden achieves an almost perfect sense of pacing to the story this time around. This is a 400-page novel and we never get the sense he is rushing the story or throwing in too many details. If anything, Golden takes his time, a point that is best evidenced by the little narratives he builds around each of the victims in the story. He also does a nice job of establishing the mood, building a sense of disquiet from the fact that the beaches of Sunnydale are filled with sea lions, obviously afraid to stay in the water because of something down below. Add to this the news that every vampire in town (but one) has fled for safer environs. Golden is definitely setting the stage for something special, and in terms of the monsters, I would say he delivers. I am less satisfied with the involvement of the Watcher's Council and Faith in "The Wisdom of War." To be fair, these are certainly two of the most problematic elements in the Buffy Mythos. During this past season the series has definitely become pretty much totally divorced from the Watcher's Council, what with them not noticing that Buffy was dead (although my guess is technically Buffy did not die because Dawn is "her" the same way the Slayer was her sister to close the portal) and with Giles having decided to do his official watching from the other side of the pond. Meanwhile, Faith is sitting in prison and any novel that deals with her has to put her right back there at the end of the tale in the same shape they found her. Golden comes down decidedly on the idea of the Council as the bad guys, although he does boil this down essentially to Quentin Travers. There is really no serious thought of an uneasy alliance here, but Golden does use the presence of the Travers and his operatives in Sunnydale to set the stage for some serious soul searching by the Slayer. So, in the end, there is a worthwhile payoff to their involvement in this affair. As for Faith, well, Golden characterization of the "rouge-but-repentant" Slayer is simply wrong. This Faith is too much the new Slayer in town who showed up in Season 3, happy to do a little butt kicking and calling Buffy "B" all the time. But this does not jive with the two-parter on "Angel" when Faith's self-loathing drove her to try and provoke Angel into killing her. Nor does it fit the conversations between Faith and Buffy in the second half of storyline. When we get to the payoff between the two Slayers in this novel Golden does come up with a very nice little scene between the two of them, but it runs counter to the way Faith had been portrayed throughout the rest of the novel. I think the Faith in need of anger management is long gone; what we last saw was a broken woman who needs to rebuild her psyche from scratch. Golden has a similarly archaic characterization of Willow as well, but he does a nice job on Xander and especially Tara (the latter is the best I have read to date). However, "The Wisdom of War" is still a first-rate "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" novel because in the final analysis neither of the above detailed caveats are central to the main action of the book. Golden's narrative hooks you early on, he keeps building up first the suspense and then the horror, and he delivers at the end. This is not a nice clean fight with vampires but a more traditional type of war with serious casualties, pertinent to the moral lesson Golden wants to make with his narrative.
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