Early Review – River of Souls (Matthew Corbett, Book 5) by Robert McCammon (3/5 stars)
Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Historical Fiction
Size: 264 pages
Publisher: Subterranean
Release Date: May 31, 2014
ISBN: 978-1596066304
Stand Alone or Series: 5th book in the Matthew Corbett series
Source: Amazon Vine
Rating: 3/5 stars
I got a copy of this book through the Amazon Vine program to review. When I got this book for review I did not realize that it is the fifth book in the Matthew Corbett series. I would recommend reading the previous books before this one, there are a lot of references to events in past books that I found hard to follow.
The story was incredibly simple. Basically Matthew takes what should be a straight-forward job escorting a beautiful girl to a country ball. However the next day a young woman is murdered and a young slave is blamed. Matthew is determined to find out the truth.
As mentioned above, I did not realize this was part of a series until I started reading it. The main story was fairly self-contained, but there are a lot of references to events that happened in past books. There are also a lot of names of past characters thrown around, the whole time I felt like I was kind of missing something. So I personally would recommend reading previous books first.
Matthew figures out who the murderer is incredibly quickly. Then he journeys with some others down the Solstice River (the River of Souls)to find the fled slave and prevent the slave from being hunted down and killed. It’s a very treacherous journey.
The plot was very predictable and very straight-forward. There weren’t really any of the twists and turns I expect of a good mystery. I did enjoy some of the description of the journey and dangers along the river. Although there were a few things (like the strange beast that cries in the woods) that were just odd and I didn’t understand why they were included.
I also didn’t find any of the characters all that engaging. Matthew was okay, he seems to be one of those characters that is smart, resourceful, and can take a licking and keep on ticking. Still, by the end of the book I wasn’t dying to read more about him.
The book ended with a bit of a cliffhanger and sets Matthew up for his next adventure. Really the whole story seemed like something that was more of a novella, and could have been novella length, without losing a lot of the story.
Overall this was an okay read. I enjoyed the swamp setting and some of the descriptions of it. I liked that this took place in the Old South. The characters were okay but not all that engaging. The plot was very simple and straight-forward for a mystery. By the end of the book I was kind of like “Eh, okay well that’s over and I won’t be reading any more of those”. It wasn’t a horrible book, but it wasn’t anything all that great either.
This book goes towards the following reading challenges:
– You Read How Many Books? Reading Challenge
