Watson writes with the hands of a surgeon: you know it's going to get worse before it gets better, but you're still just hoping at some point it will get better. He drops his characters into the stickiest of situations and lets you watch as they flounder, helpless in the face of their own mistakes. I devoured this all at once on a plane ride; it was the perfect book to have in hand because the increasingly complicated plot lines dragged me ever onward.

The audio narration is charming and full of life for such a short story (it took about an hour to listen to). I loved the sound effects, and hearing it made me pick up on more details. This is an ingenious tale that takes a grown up Snow White and sends her on her way to rescue Sleeping Beauty -- but everything is not quite what it seems.

Val is a sheltered but alarmingly self-involved girl who is part succubus. This would be really cool, if she wasn't a strait-laced personality-less loser who is embarrassed by strip clubs. Look, you can be part succubus and worry about never finding a man to love you, or you can be awkward and embarrassed by sex--not both. Every conversation in this book felt unrealistic and bizarre, and if anyone acted like these characters in real life any normal person would run screaming in the other direction. And don't even get me started on how Val's business partner bullies her into kissing him and then loses his shit when her inner succubus feeds on him. No thanks.

The Devil's Deep starts out as some kind of medical mystery, becomes a navel-gazing study of a pretentious law school student, and ends as a multi-generational thriller as a cast of infantile adults try to destroy each other's lives while the pretentious law school student steps in to save the day and maybe get laid along the way. I started to get interested about halfway through when the law school student and his boss/love interest go to Costa Rica, but then the entire plot line is revealed shortly after, though the book continues long after in an exhaustive attempt to wrap up loose ends that is destroyed by the bizarre epilogue. I think it has a lot of potential, if all of the dialogue was rewritten to seem like actual human speech and it was about a third of the length.

A bizarre tesseract of a novel, Pale Fire is, ostensibly, a poem, but it is really the Foreword, the Poem, The Footnotes, and the Index. The foreword introduces you to a strange man from a country you've never heard of who professes to be the good friend of the author of the poem 'Pale Fire' and then presents, with much further ado, the poem in question followed by his opinions and histories (which have very little to do with the poem itself). I switched back and forth by reading one canto, the footnotes for it, then the next, and so on, which helped me see Shade and Kinbote as equal protagonists. It it amusing and bizarre and leaves you wondering who, if anyone, was the hero of the tale, and who, if anyone, was ever telling the truth.

In my opinion the most devastating of this series (at least, so far), A Storm of Swords takes as few prisoners as its characters as the War of the Five Kings rages on. Daenerys, Stannis, and Jon are all forced to decide what type of leaders they will be, as Sansa struggles when faced with the reality of marriage in this world and the real Arya runs more or less free as a fake Arya marries a Bolton in her place. Martin weaves a complex and harrowing tale that is as well written and fast paced as the first two volumes.