ICN

Gonna preface this by saying that my memory wouldn't exactly win any awards, so if I missed or forgot something please feel free to remind me. One thing I didn't like was how Conflux was handled. No one questioned him about Steelheart's weakness, or about anything at all. I know he was a prisoner and all, but after being one for six years I think he would've picked something up. And then once they decide to go all in and attempt to kill Steelheart without knowing his weakness, nothing is mentioned of what they do with him. Do they let him go? Put him in the Helicopter? To me, it makes Conflux into a plot device instead of an actual character. "I used to teach fifth grade until an Epic destroyed it." Please tell me it wasn't the Proffesor who did it. Maybe it's just me, but I've seen this type of thing done entirely too often for it to do anything but annoy me. Anyways, I'm really hoping I'm wrong about this and it was some other Epic. Megan's death threw me for a loop, since I was thinking there was no way she could die with unresolved plot threads hanging. I was starting to think she was really dead when Conflux said his bit about being unable to gift powers to epics. That's when I figured out that Megan and the Professor were both Epics, though not which Epic Megan was. A nice touch altogether. The ending was fantastic as always. I figured out a few of the things, but there were still enough unexpected twists to keep it exciting. One last minor nitpick: At the end, David decides that he feels more loyalty to the city than to the Reckoners, and this just seemed to come out of left field for me. As far as I can remember, he never showed any particular attachment to the city or its inhabitants. He does briefly grapple with the problem that removing Steelheart will cause chaos, but in the end he comes down on the side of removing the tyrant instead of preserving a meager amount of peace. It's not a very big issue, but I just thought I'd bring it up in case someone had a good rebuttal for it. Overall though I very much enjoyed it. The humor was great, the action scenes as well executed as always, and there are a few interesting plot hooks left open for future books.