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This book starts out quite well. It has plenty of weird names and jumps around between parallel story-lines, which made it a bit tricky for me easily follow. It would have been quite straight forward, had it not been for the "brilliant" idea of writing the headers for each time-line using the Deseret alphabet. Had I known about this from the beginning things would have been a bit easier, but nope.

The story is quite interesting from the beginning, all very steampunky without too much focus gadgetry details. Too bad my appreciation for this book didn't hold up until the end. After the first two thirds of the book, the story went down-hill. It failed to keep me interested as a few surprising plot twists were presented here and there while the main characters kept running around with guns blazing and blood and vomit spewing. The author manages to create a bullet-proof against all odds atmosphere which then extends strenuously page after pager, chapter after chapter, on and on, until you're basically skimming through the excessive gun fights in order to get to the point.

But sure, the gun fights are pretty well written, there is a lot of variation and some twists to them, it's just not my thing... One thing that really annoyed me though, was the rather excessive use of onomatopoeia (yes, I had too look up how to spell that) as soon as something unexpected happens, which it tends to do, when guns are blazing.

I was not at all impressed by this book. I feel no sympathy for any of the main characters. The bulk of the book is made up of dull filling material stuffed in between some (only slightly more interesting) build-up toward the inevitable final confrontation. I got this book as part of a humble bundle so I haven't read any other books by Mario Acevedo. I have no plans on reading the rest of the series, this book was more than enough for me.

The book is filled with frustratingly frequent descriptions of every single meal taken by the main character; I get the point: normal(ish) food with extra blood (cause he's a vampire). It feels like the only reason the author came up with the dietary part of his take on the vampire myth was to be able to add pages to the book as it adds very little to the overall atmosphere. When eating is not the main focus, it is guns (this guy really likes guns), then vampire myth stuff (which is slightly more interesting). I was a bit amazed at the extensive vocabulary used to describe anything remotely related to sex, although for the most part this was delivered as rather pointless filling material.

There were two things which I thought the author really managed to bring out: the shady military operation (that gave me the creeps several times) and most of what happened on Planet Pleasure (sadly this was only about 10 % of the book).

I enjoyed the storyline of this book. The main characters are reasonably deep with some development over throughout the story. I found the steampunk setting redundant; the book would have been better off without the repeated breaking points in the story where the author elaborates on the technical and practical aspects of airships and the "skyways". The author did a good job at introducing new elements which fed my imagination and hopes of a great ending. Too bad none of these expectation were met in the end.