Exodus Towers, by Jason M Hough

Ah, the middle book in a trilogy. From C. S. Lewis's The Space Trilogy to Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games the second entry is often the worst. (Interestingly, for movies the opposite is often true; The Godfather: Part II, The Empire Strikes Back, Aliens, The Road Warrior, and The Dark Knight off the top of my head are all the best in their respective series.) The first book usually has a solid ending, but the second book tends to end with a cliffhanger; coupled with the second book customarily existing simply to set up the third, when judged as a whole it generally appears lacking. While entertaining, The Exodus Towers falls into this trap.

Early in the plot a new band of plague-immune soldiers appears as a second (or third if you count the alien Builders) antagonist, but they are dispatched surprisingly quickly. A time-distortion field is encountered so while our heroes only experience hours, months are going by outside—while certainly a way of accelerating to the next Builder event, the idea that nothing important or interesting happens outside the time bubble seems a stretch. There is a nice use of the bubble during a firefight I thought was clever, though, so this wasn't all bad. Despite a plodding pace, Hough's writing remains engaging, including a near perfect description of what you see when your eyes are closed: "Radiant amoeba-like shapes swam in a sea of molten orange, and any attempt he made to focus on one served only to obscure it further." The strangest thing about this novel was that the author (and editor, I suppose) seems to think that a five-sided figure is a hexagon rather than a pentagon. Not a typo either; in chapter 50 the apparent importance of the number 5 by the Builders is realized when they discover a set of nested hexagons on a ship. Odd.

Overall I still enjoyed the story, but it suffers by clearly being a bridge to the third book rather than standing on its own merit. That said, I'll see this epic through to the conclusion in The Plague Forge.

First Sentence:

The girl danced for an audience of ghosts.