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A wise man once said: The failure mode of 'clever' is 'asshole'. The Consuming Fire spends way too much time in the failure mode of clever.

It's not a bad story, as such, it's just that the style of writing constantly rubs me the wrong way. Everything is dialogue, like a radio play. Everyone is trying to out-clever everyone else. Everything is a joke. While there's substance here, it's all subservient to style. It knows its tropes and winks knowingly while employing them. But the rub is: knowing the tropes and pointing them out is just being cynical, if you're not elevating your material beyond them. Redshirts did that. TCF does not.

TCF wants to be as clever Redshirts, but falls flat. This is easy reading, this is space opera in the guise of junk food, this is being a smartarse without being smart, this is characters saying 'fuck' a lot, this is sex and death and horror and mystery, all of it feeling breezy and light and inconsequential. It's also competently written, the plot has some nice twists, I'll be checking out the next book in the series as well, and probably will write a smart-arse review about it. Because if your book thinks it's too cool for school, the readers will end up thinking they are that as well.