I recently got The Dying Time off my friend before he moved to Australia. I've got 5 or 6 BT novels now, and I have to say, despite being the same sort of size and length as the others, this book just felt like it dragged on forever. I feel about this book the same way I feel about Clan vs IS in the books. I love to play as Clan, but for some reason I find reading Clan books to be... I don't know... more dull? than reading IS books.
It's probably the lack of spying, lying, cheating and backstabbing (Call of Duty for example with Count Nicholas Fisk playing Archer's Avengers against Snord's Irregulars, while manouevering the Irregulars into a bad position politically, and playing Wolverton's Highlanders against their parent unit, the men of the unit against their commander, and them against Snord's Irregulars. Hell of a lot of political manouevering going on, while you have a good battle and interpersonal interaction going on at the same time.)
I figured being an IS book, sending a bunch of mercs to defend a planet they'd attacked only 10-15 years earlier would be brilliant drama... instead it seemed to bog down into a slow-motion game of chess with 2 half-blind opponents, flailing out with pawns until something like 1/2 to 2/3 through the book, when suddenly you get the GDL being pitted against some stupid number of Skye rebels outside Defiance Industries. A lot of seemingly important people just get snuffed out on random skirmishes (GDL flyboy randomly killed to lucky autocannon fire across cockpit, Lori Kalmar-Carlyle killed by a grenade because she forgot to take off her coolant vest in a locker room, and another high-ranking GDL guy gets killed at the very start of a fight by a lucky cockpit shot.)
At the end of the book, I felt, I dunno... cheated? Boring boring boring guy dies, boring boring 2 guys die, boring, insanely big battle, more people die, GDL is nearly completely wiped out, and the book ends... somewhat ambiguously too, as if to give the reader the feeling that Katrina wants the unit gone for good.
