Point and Shoot

Point and Shoot by Duane Swierczynski

After the greatness that was Hell and Gone, I expected the final installment of the Charlie Hardie trilogy to be at least a bit of a letdown. While the novel did live up to that expectation, it was still pretty good. It was just what we’ve come to expect from both Charlie Hardie and author Duane Swierczynski. It was full of death, destruction, and mayhem. And though the particulars of the ending were not surprising, the details of how we got there were.

Only two negatives about the book for me. Unfortunately, they were both rather big. First, I felt denied a proper resolution for Mann. I’m sure plenty of other readers disagree, but I felt cheated. That left a bitter taste in my mouth. Huge disappointment.

The other negative was the large amount of recaps. I know and expect that series contain brief expositions of what happened in previous books. I don’t always like it, but it’s fine. Point and Shoot had a lot of them, and they were not brief. Usually, the recaps are sprinkled near the beginnings of books. Not this time. It felt to me as if they grew more frequent the further along the book went. It threw off the rhythm of my reading and took me out of the story on a few occasions.

So while the story was fine, I was left a little displeased. All in all, it was an OK, but not really satisfying conclusion to the trilogy.

C+