Red Horizon

I loved the first book and was ecstatic to see this get an audiobook. It wasn’t quite to the level of Lunar Discovery - it took far too long to get going, and the character development felt much more clunky - but the ending was excellent. I look forward to book 3!

The story is fine. Clearly, this is an epic just getting started. What annoys me though is that it's been a few months since I listened to the first but the author assumes you have a good memory of all the minutiae of his first story in the series. Some authors do a great job reminding you of details so you think, oh yeah, that's why this is important. Some do an even better job and make it so that even if you failed to read the first one, you can still follow it. Mercer does neither of those things here, not even a little bit. So the characters felt completely undeveloped and not compelling because the reader is clearly expected to remember all that stuff from the first book. There's even at least one scene that makes an oblique reference to an event that happens in the first book with no lead in and no explanation and left me completely nonplussed. So, don't do what I did, if you listened or read the first one months ago, give it a fresh skim first before listening to this one or you'll probably be as uninterested in the continuation of this story going forward as I am now.