(This review was written several months ago, before I launched the review site)
I just finished reading Caine’s Law by Matthew Stover, the final book in the Acts of Caine series.
Quick synopsis: Hari “Caine” Michaelson has a conversation with a bunch of people who may or may not exist, about things that may or may not have happened, in which he explains fuck-all about what’s going on. Then, he pulls a deus ex machina completely out of his ass. Time travel may or may not be involved.
It is seriously hard to describe the plot of this book.
Caine’s Law has all of the problems of Blade of Tychalle. Abstract magic, scenes that are metaphors, scenes that might not have actually happened, an inability to stick to one definition of what’s real, characters steadily revealing dramatic things about themselves that don’t make sense and aren’t earned in any way and don’t really change anything. All that godawful shit.
I’m honestly not sure why I liked it so much.
Maybe it’s because the book actually attempts to justify all of this nonsense with its explanation of how gods work, which is actually quite original and very cool. Or maybe it’s because the characters all seem to have recognizable human motivations this time, even if the “blood of the blind god” and associated noise still doesn’t make any sense, acting as both deus and diabolus ex machina at different points in the story. Or maybe it’s because I, much like the Leisure caste that rules this alternate Earth, really enjoy watching Caine work. And it is Caine this time, very distinctly, unlike Blade of Tyshalle which got bogged down with Hari Michaelson for a truly inexcusable number of pages.
Whatever the reason, I actually, genuinely liked Caine’s Law, once it got going (it did take a while to pick up speed, but if I dropped every book that didn’t catch me in the first paragraph I’d barely read anything). I think I’m good with this being the end of the series, though. It’s gotten to the point where Caine is so smugly all-powerful and unchallenged that he’s often more annoying than the villains he fights.
Goodbye, Hari Michaelson. You had a fantastically pulpy start, violent and dystopian, and then you took a hard left turn into weird magic and metaphor that you never quite recovered from. But hey, at least we’ll always have Heroes Die. That’s worth putting up with quite a lot of bullshit, right there.