Sans Handlebars

Started out well enough. I grew to like the characters and the style of storytelling. Then towards the end of the book we get some ridiculous big reveal, a bunch of loose ends, and absolutely zero resolution, making the the time I spent listening to the audiobook feel wasted. When our main protagonist, Nico Storm, is confronted by the person who is directly responsible for all of the world's problems, he has nearly no reaction and seems to shrug it all off, despite this same person also being directly linked to the death of his father. Throughout the book Nico Storm has a saying of something like "nothing happens, then everything happens all at once" which sums up thos book quite nicely as nothing of much consequence happens throughout the book, and things that seemed like they'd be more important turn out to be consequential, and then in the last few short chapters we get what's supposed to be the big reveal of the who, how, and why behind the Fever, and it is the most ludicrous explanation and contradicts what was told earlier in the book. The everything of those reasons which suddenly happens all at once in some lazy info dump devoid of any believable emotions. Despite Nico now becoming fully aware of all this, confronted with the very person responsible for all of his personal losses, pain and strife, and those of all the people he's cone to know and love over the years after the Fever, he has no deep emotional response and simply decides to go on his merry way back home. An altercation, a little before the ending of the book, between Nico and an antagonist character (not a villain but still an antagonist) simply peters out, and a setup regarding actual villainous antagonists never gets resolved. This book has been listed as a stand alone novel, but it seems to be the opening part of a series considering the big nothing that happens at the end.