Annihilation Squad (Last Chancers)

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: After reading about Schaeffer's Last Chancers in the Imperial Guard codex, I got my hands on a copy of Kill Team. I enjoyed Gav Thorpe's Angels of Darkness, so I had faith that Kill Team would live up to the same standards. It did.
Annhiliation Squad did not. The beginning is a bit disorienting and there is a noticeable lack of character development that made the previous novel interesting. Much of the plot development is meandering and monotonous. The epic backdrop of the 3rd Armageddon War can't even invigorate this lackluster story. In the last 3rd of the book there are some intriguing twists that immediately spiral into a miasmic convolution that abruptly terminates like a piece of rotten fruit hitting a concrete wall. You read the last sentence and turn the page, thinking there will be another paragragh or new chapter and realize that the story is just ... over!
I won't speculate why it ended the way it did, but it was disappointing.

Rating:
Summary: nice ending to a great series
Review: I absolutely loved this book. The action was intense, the plot twists awesome, and the ending is one of the best i've ever seen. Some books leave me with this wow feeling when im done with it, and this is one of those books.

Rating:
Summary: What happend Gav?
Review: Wow! Was this ever BAD! Awful! Stinks! ....
Absolutely none of the "charm" of the earlier Last Chancer's novels. If there was character development here, I sure missed it. The plot is weak -Chancers land on Armageddon and wander around supposedly on an assassination mission - but mostly stuff just happens. And speaking of stuff just happening... the ending feels so tacked on, artificial, and just plane dumb, you almost wonder if Thorpe had to complete the last chapters in 10-15 minutes to meet a publishing deadline. I wish I could be more specific with the flaws in this book but I don't want to provide any spoilers to those that would like to experience this for themselves.

Really, truly, surprisingly bad. That's sad since the others in the series have been interesting reads. Hopefully this was an aberration, not a sign of things to come.