'Black Ops' by Craig Alanson
'Black Ops' by Craig Alanson

The good

  • Joe and Skippy are back, with more entertaining and cheesy jokes and insults.

  • Some entertaining action and subterfuge.

  • There’s actually something at stake in this book. In the previous ones, Skippy felt all-powerful and the merry bands of pirates unstoppable, so there wasn’t much suspense. Here, you finally get the sense that they could actually fail or have things go wrong. I mean, you know it’ll ultimately turn out OK, but there’s at least a little suspense along the way.

The not so good

  • The jokes in this one lean more towards the cheesy and less towards the actually laugh-out-loud funny.

  • There are a lot of what I call “paper thin plot lines” that are there solely to try to explain away why Skippy can’t do some super amazing thing he did in previous books (whereas the reality is that if he did that same thing again, it would make the problems in this story trivial, and the book would be over in a few pages).

Rating: 4 stars