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At this point I feel obligated to finish the series, I purchased all of them for Pete's sake, but Butterworth has to be the laziest writer I've ever read. He constantly uses full names and titles like a Jr. High School student trying desperately to reach a minimum word count.

Like the last 8 books in his uncanonical MASH series he spends the first third of the book catching retelling you wish happened in the last book, most of the rest of it coming up with excuses for the ever increasing cast of characters from around the globe to hand to travel to the name sake city, and then in the final chapter we touch on what the back of the book says the story was about.

I liked this book. It was kind of hokey, but if you go in knowing that its fine for what it is. It was supposed to the be first book in a series that never got a sequel, so apparently not too many others liked it. It's the first work I'm aware of DeCandido did of his own, rather than the media-tie-in fiction is more well known. He's one of my favorites Start Trek authors.

The book revolves around the Super city Police Department. The city is so called because they have more superheroes than any one town in the D.C. universe ever did. Unlike Commissioner Gordon, the cops of the SCPD hate the superheroes, or "the costumes" a derogatory term they use. The cops get stuck trying to prove that Super villains are actually guilty of the crime that the superheroes have stopped them from doing, but of course all the evidence has been vaporized, and the heroes refuse to testify as it might damage their brand, or worse yet reveal their secret identify.

On top of that they get stuck uber nerds who think they can become their own superheroes, or super villains, and more often than not get themselves hurt.

The Claw is a serial murder who seems to show up ever 2 years or so and kill many people and then go into hiding. He seems to slice open his victims using a giant eagle talon, and since all the victims have the same DNA it would appear they are not copycat crimes.

A long and winding tale, complete with abusive husbands, cranky neighbors, and the like, we end up learning the criminal is an unlikely member of the community, but looking back on it a few days later, it actually should have been pretty obvious that is who it would have been.

Marvel has done many similar stories over the years of how the courts and insurance and the like deal with the aftermath of superheroes, if you want a previously unlicensed version, this one is for you.

wouldn't that have been something

There is 0 break in the story, for whatever story there is, between The Golden Apple and Part 1 The Eye in The Pyramid. I guess that's one reason why since at least the 90s Illuminatus! has only been printed as one single volume containing the whole trilogy.

There is not much I can say about this that I didn't already say in 2022 when I reviewed The eye in the pyramid: The writing style is out there; the character who makes up the first person prose changes with no more than a single paragraph break; I feel it is like what reading an LSD trip would be like. Part of me wondered what it would be like to read while on drugs, but I was not going to start doing drugs just to find out.

Without the description of the black mass, it wasn't quite as offensive as the first. Personally, I could not have read all three books one after the other. My brain just needs time to heal from all this.

In many places, including on the cover itself, this book is classified as Science Fiction, but it's not science fiction at all in any way. Not like a "But Star Wars isn't Science Fiction, it's a Space Opera" way but there is nothing in the plot related to changes or questions about science. I mean sure there is a submarine on the cover, and there is like one scene that take place aboard the submarine "Leif Erickson" but that's it.

I'll finish the Trilogy, but it will probably be another 3 years before I do.