BuyMort: 30,000 Leagues: How I Merged to Become Nu-Earth Affiliated (BuyMort - The Shopocalypse Saga by Joseph Phelps
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I remember the previous book being less good than the first two and I couldn't quite place my finger on it. But now? The fourth helped me figure it out.

It's the scale. I tend to get more and more invested in a series as long as there's a sense of real location no matter how big the scale actually is. In this case, we're all over the Earth because it's all-out consolidation time and the survivors need to prevent further corporate takeovers of the market that is the biomass of our poor planet.

I didn't mind the whole Kraken or Beholder angles, but even those battles need to have decent anchoring and I thought proper emotional anchoring was kinda up in the air. Sure, we have Molls and protecting his massively-expanding community and refugee affiliates (read aliens), but I'm missing the whole WHY does he fight so hard, too.

I want to love this. I really do. It's close enough to Dungeon Crawler Carl to generally be right up all those DCC lover's alleys. But aside from the whole capitalistic nightmare vibe (which is great) I'm just hoping it grounds itself a bit before hightailing it right out of the system to brand new markets.

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