Williams, Liz -- The Iron Khan [e-book purchase]

Fifth book about Detective Inspector Chen and (at this point) his coterie of demons, Celestial warriors, familiars, ghosts, and Emperors of Heaven. Okay, only one of that last.

This one never clicked for me. The problem is possibly on my end -- I read it while tired. But, for whatever reason, the story felt overstuffed. There are four narrative threads running through most of the book (following Chen, Zhu Irzh, Inari, and a newly-introduced shaman). There are two Big Bads who seem to be independent of each other. There's the occult city of Agarta, the White Pyramid, a talking book, a time-travel spell, a terra-cotta army, a quick glimpse of Rlyeh, and -- well -- a bunch of other stuff.

It was too much stuff. Normally I'm all about the "jam more in" approach, but the climaxes stepped on each other's feet rather than building bang-bang-bang into a torrent of awesomeness. Maybe this wanted to be two novels; if so, neither of them got developed the way I wanted.

I don't mean to complain too much. It's a fun book and plenty of cool stuff happened. I don't expect to give up on the series (assuming there are more forthcoming), but this entry was a little weak.


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