Breach of Peace Review

E-Book, 98 Pages
Adult/ Fantasy/ Novella
By: Daniel Greene
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟 3/4

“Love is a beautiful thing. Is it not, Inspector?”

Breach of Peace is Daniel Greene’s debut and is a prequel novella to what will be his “The Lawful Times” series. I think it is not a common thing to do because authors usually release prequels to already successful series. Daniel wants his main series to be as polished as possible so the novellas are also a chance for him to hone his writing skills while making some money which is very smart and fair! So did I think it was perfect?

Of course I did not and I did not expect it to be. I know there is bad experience from books released by youtubers because either the quality is bad or because it is apparently not written by them! What is different here is that Daniel is a booktuber so he does read and review a lot of books and he knows what works and what doesn’t. I think writing is a talent that can be improved and honestly Daniel has a talent. I think with time, it will be even better.

So the book follows Inspector Khlid as the main character and we have the supporting characters of Sam who happens to be her husband and Inspector Chapman and they are all Officers of Gods. The novella opens with a pretty graphic murder scene of an imperial family and our inspectors need to investigate that.

I think the writing was pretty good with a few places where I felt it was clunky, some of the things were not consistent like the Ministry of Health which characters mostly called M.O.H. (which is a mouthful and I felt it is smoother to say the full thing.) Also the characters said it full the first time and then started using its abbreviation after that which did not make sense to me. I would have preferred a bit more eloquent writing because I didn’t highlight many things in the book.

When it comes to the characters, I kind of stand somewhere in the middle, I didn’t have strong emotions for them but I did not hate them. I think because it is a Novella and it is our first exposure to the characters then it is a tough thing to care about them in such a few pages. I don’t know why but I felt everyone were abusing their powers and positions and it kind of irked me!

The world-building is incomplete, I felt we needed more world-building and there were many things that were explained a bit late which made them feel like an after thought and a solution to a problem the author faced. I think it is a bit of a harsh criticism given that it is a short book but I would have appreciated more world-building!

The pacing is fast and the book can be read in a couple of hours (I read it in 1.5 hours) and it was full of action scenes which were very good and I liked. I think the foreshadowing was a bit too obvious for me so it made a few things predictable. But what I did not expect was how brutal the book is, Daniel is ruthless and has no problem killing most of the characters which I found equally awesome and scary!

Summary: I think it was a good job for a debut Novella, the writing is good and I know it will become better, the characters are okay but Daniel had no mercy for them. We could have used more world-building but the pacing and action scenes were pretty good. I loved the ending to be honest and I will certainly be reading the next books in the series!