A few months ago, when I was sitting in the teacher's lounge and waiting for my next assignment on a very odd day of substitute teaching, I read Flash Gold by Lindsay Buroker, a steampunk novella that I'd found for free while browsing Amazon.com's bestseller lists. I'd just finished another free novella I'd found that was so bad it was a bit puzzling, so my expectations for Flash Gold were not remarkably high, but I was pleased to find that it was very enjoyable. It took me a while to get to it, but after that, I actually bothered to buy the second and third books in the series for my Kindle (which wasn't very expensive at all), leading me to believe that the author's making the first book available for free was an effective tactic.
Today, I finished reading The Flash Gold Chronicles #2: Hunted, which was, like the first book in the series, very entertaining. It wasn't hard to tell that this was the middle of a trilogy, since the plot with Kali, the main character, and her ex-boyfriend seems to wrap up conflicts introduced in the first book, and, as someone who has read books before, it seems obvious that the mysterious woman pursuing Kali is the set-up for the series' grand finale. It was still fun to read, though, with interesting dialogue, a lot of cool steampunk nonsense, and, though this is a slight spoiler, two likable main characters who don't waste too much time in actually admitting that they like each other. It reminds me a lot of the Spice and Wolf series in that it's about nice people traveling around and having adventures in a fantasy setting, not taking itself too seriously as it goes. So far, though, the Flash Gold books have been moving a lot faster, and where Spice and Wolf deals with politics and economics, the characters in Flash Gold deal with the much more immediate issues of bounty hunters and explosions.
Though I'm tempted to read the third Flash Gold book right now and finish off the whole series, I saw a really outdated YA novel about the perils of video gaming in the back of the library that I think I'm going to read instead. Despite my distraction, though, I am genuinely interested in seeing how the series ends and coming back here to type my opinions on it into the void.
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