Review: Quantum Radio by A.G. Riddle

The good

• An intriguing, grand mystery to drive the story along.

• A fun new universe (err… multiverse) to explore.

• Some decent action and plot twists.

The not so good

• As in A.G. Riddle’s Long Winter series, the protagonist is an impossibly smart super genius. Super smart characters can be great if you get some sense of how they figure things out, such as with a Sherlock Holmes deduction. But the super smart character in this book just knows things purely from intuition, not deduction or logic or anything else. He makes such absurd leaps, that it breaks you out of the world of the story, and makes you realize the character knows these things just because the author knows these things. So instead of seeming impressive, it just feels lame.

• The characters feel like tropes: with the unreasonably perfect mix of diversity (two men, two women, one white, one asian, etc.) and skills (one soldier, one scientist, one artist, etc.) that every “save the world” adventure must have.

• Ends on a cliffhanger that seems to set up a series of books, but as far as I can tell, this book is actually standalone.

Rating: 3 stars