I snagged the Audiobook for Breach of Peace a while back, as Daniel is one of the BookTubers that I enjoy and I wanted to see how he did for his first novella. Since he wrote this, it's important to note that he's expanded this series and published another book. So, I won't comment too much on the writing itself. I think it was fairly good for a first book, and while it's not perfect... who's debut writing is?
I listened to this over the weekend, so while it's fresh in my mind I wanted to briefly talk about it.
Overall Impression
I'll be blunt: I wasn't a big fan of this book. I think it missed the mark on its intended goal of introducing readers to the world where the rest of this series takes place. Or, I should say, it doesn't do more than dip your toes into the very surface of the world. It is a very short book, clocking in at just 98 pages, so I don't feel like I wasted my time on it, which is a bonus. I also think that the world itself has promise, but I won't know that until the next book in the series, which this book definitely didn't hook me on purchasing. So, I don't know if I'll ever go forward on this and explore the world more. But, I'll talk more about that below.
Detailed Thoughts
[SPOILERS AHEAD, YOU'VE BEEN WARNED]
Having read through this twice, I'm left feeling wholly unsatisfied. The book opens with a gruesome murder scene and introduces us to our three main characters, all of whom are working for this world's version of a police force.
It does a great job of setting the tone of the world as a dark and gritty world with a similar near-modern level of technology. At this point in the story, it's presented as very much a murder mystery... but that quickly gets left behind as the plot progresses. This could be due to the short page-count requiring a fast-progressing plot to allow a complete resolution, but I'd have preferred this to be a bit more drawn out. The main mystery of who could have committed a murder of an important and powerful family is fairly quickly resolved by what feels like an artificial leap of logic when the main character is discussing the case with one of the other main characters who is an inspector for the force. Within a handful of lines, they settle on the motives behind the murder being down to the family knowing some secret way to make steel (which is apparently rare in this world), and having been murdered for it to "send a message".
In the same span of time, we are given two world-related pieces of information: much of the setting is dominated by a god-appointed Empire, and secondly, there are vicious rebels that are pushing back against this divine empire. We also get the aforementioned detail about steel being rare and valuable, and some allusions to "demons" having existed at some point in the past but having been semi-recently wiped out.
Predictably, one of the three main characters is part of the Rebellion - and they are likely to be the perpetrators of the murders. After a bit of conflict with the primary character, the Rebel Main convinces our primary character to have everyone in her precinct come to some abandoned warehouse that is likely controlled by government forces because as a rebel he can authoritatively state that they weren't involved in the murder case that he was working on.
The rest of the cast dutifully follows this thread, and finds that, of course, the government IS running some kind of secret lab that is turning people into monsters for some unknown reason that is totally divorced from the plot thread about steel being rare. Then in a blazing showdown, the entire cast is murdered by some demon-like government agent and we're left with a "resolved" plot that still has somehow left multiple glaring questions completely open.
So, while it does dip your toes into the world, I don't think it does a good job on selling me, personally, on why I should buy the second book. None of the characters I met are alive to create a compelling thread to follow, and the core plot of "bad government is doing bad shady things but why?" just isn't enough of a hook for me. It might be a series that has promise, but I kind of wish I'd started on the follow-up book that spun off of this novella, as I suspect it'll probably do a much better job at convincing me to keep reading... but I didn't. I started with the introductory novella and now I'm just kind of yawning about the whole thing.