Has anyone read his books?
As far as I know, he has two books out right now: Black Magic Woman and The Hades Project. A sequel to Black Magic Woman, called Evil Ways, is coming out sometime this year or something.
I just finished Black Magic Woman. It was a pretty decent book. I have to admit, from some of the rave reviews on Amazon.com, and the fact that Jim Butcher read the manuscript and said it was amazing (in different words), I expected it to be way better.
Warning: Rambling and complaints ahead. As you always should, take my opinions with a grain of salt.
The author gets major points off for the beginning of the book. It was completely pointless. The vampire scene was vaguely interesting. But the faith healer guy, and Libby exposing him, was completely obvious, mostly because it was, almost exactly, a fairly well-known "supernatural" scandal sometime ago. It was exposed by some ex-magician or something a while ago, and Gustainis just changed the names, a bit of the personalities to suit his needs, and the way it was exposed. Not particularly original. On top of that, that's about three full chapters where he could have been setting up the plot. Instead, he chooses to demostrate the power of his characters. A good thought in its way, but that should be done while advancing the plot, not in a completely useless sidestory.
The characters were, to my mind, somewhat shallow. I think Gustainis was a bit too ambitious. He tried to itroduce too many main characters, and instead of developing a couple well, he developed eight somewhat poorly. The two main characters had potential. He just... didn't use that potential.
Another thing that I didn't much like was that the author included a lot of extraneous information. All in all, inclduing aforementioned wasted chapters, he's got over fifty pages of useless information. There's the vampire fighting, Morris's family's past, Libby exposing the fraudulent faith healer, Van Dreenan's reasons for believing in magic, and a couple other things. It was probably his way of trying to make the characters more believable and "human," but it really doesn't work for me.
And I think that's all. n.n"
