Europe at Dawn (The Fractured Europe Sequence, #4) by
November 2019
I enjoyed this whole series, though by this fourth book, the number of characters (and their aliases and affiliations) and had grown so expansive that I did find myself floundering every now and then. I also realized that I really wanted to spend most of my time with the two ostensibly “main” characters (Rudi and Rupert), and I felt a little thrill each time one or the other of them appeared on the scene again - but that didn’t happen as often as I would have liked. There was a lot of depth to these two characters, and I would have liked more exploration of it. [Slight spoiler:] I was also somewhat taken aback by the ending: after spinning out a complex tale over four whole books, everything seemed to kind of come to a jumbled sort-of-but-not-really conclusion in the very last chapter. There were some nice surprises in that chapter, but there was also a feeling that this book was not, in fact, the ending of anything but just another link in an ongoing story. Maybe that’s deliberate, maybe it’s not, but I can’t say I felt wholly satisfied when I turned the last page. That said, Hutchinson has created an intriguing, complex world here, and I enjoyed tearing through the series over the space of two months. This book and the one before it may not have entirely lived up to the excitement of the first two, but I don’t regret the time I spent reading them.