Coyote Rising was a necessary read after its prequel Coyote, both being quite compulsive reads. Coyote Rising however manages to amplify all the faults of its parent story, Both it seems were written as serialisations and have not been edited when joined, the result is a lot of recaps throughout the text - if you have a short attention span this could be a very good thing, I found it annoying as it seriously broke the flow of the story.
The author should also have insisted on a better proof reader, there are many misplaced, mis-spelled and duplicated words. the book also relies on a lot of geographic descriptions that suffer from the author confusing east and west even in the same sentence. The book relies on quite a lot of technical description which is woefully inaccurate, not just regarding the science but also the trivial handcrafts that are described, I wonder if the author uses wikipedia for research, it certainly would seem so.
OK it is a cheap book and perhaps I am expecting too much from something that was probably churned out in a few weeks, dont get me wrong, i enjoyed the book it is a real page turner, but I doubt that I'll be reading the final book. I managed to suspend disbelief most of the time, but one thing really made this book grate with me; the society represented is easily recognised as twentieth century USA, especially in its slightly smalltown puritanical views on alcohol, sex, work ethic, frontiersmanship, etc. These people are still sitting on front porches, wearing baseball caps and drinking coffee - even though it is set in the distant future, in an alien environment.
there was a fantastic opportunity to creatively imagine a different future here, but the author has settled for deadwood with a few slightly different trees.
