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| Book Cover via Amazon.com |
To start let me go into the initial impressions of "Outlaw MC", and it was a rather bumpy but catching start. My main issue was that there was an extremely violent and horrifying opener, and it got my attention to be sure. The sheer disgusting situation was one where I needed to finish reading the book in hopes that I could get some closure. Spoiler, I did.
To the next part of the review in my critiques, I go into the "Story Structure, Foundation and Presentation" portion of my scoring system. In this case, I had some issues with the foundation. There were a few grammatical errors and tense issues with the book. For example, there'd been situations where it was in past tense mostly, and in one or two sentences be in the present tense that was outside of dialogue. It was just enough that it was distracting, but not so much that it was difficult to read.
My next part of the critiques come in the "Cliche Much" critique, and this has to do with biker cliches. The "Of course he's a terrible human because he's a biker" cliche comes across 99% of the bikers represented. I do realize this was written as the period of the late '70s and early '80s, and there were a lot of reasons for these stereotypes and cliche's, but the representations in "Outlaw MC" read vacant, almost soulless. There are no moments where there are any cracks in the seams, every one of them is a brainless sheep, and no signs of conflict in character or constitution, either in a group or individually. Aside from 2 literal characters, none of the bikers have any sort of tangible background or character development that would indicate they are real, and those two are Wolf and Pickins. Every other biker, including the leaders, read like "Bond Villian's" in that they are a cookie-cutter bad guy that the heroes have to get through. I wasn't expecting this out of the second novel, especially considering how unique the villains were in the first novel.
With that said, let me go into the things I truly enjoyed about "Outlaw MC" and we go into "Story Structure, Foundation, and Presentation". I loved how well the story was plotted. The overall flow of the story, and how the structure was introduced, was very well done. This is especially nice in the 2nd book in a series, because sometimes an author takes for granted that people have the first book, and does not do as much foundational work for the second book. In this case, the foundational work that was done was for this book alone and had nothing to do with the first one. The movement in the story was very good, and it traveled well from page one to the very end of the story. I appreciated how much work was done for the fluidity in the plot, and I enjoyed the pacing with it. As such, the tension was just right and was a fantastic counterbalance to the pacing.
Second, under the category of "Whole Story", I'm happy to say that "Outlaw MC" was a fully fleshed out story, with a full beginning, middle and ending. The ending was impactful, it had full meaning to it and I enjoyed it.
Overall, this isn't a story that I would have read on my own without someone asking me to read it. I know I'm not the target audience for "Outlaw MC", but I also know that I would have missed out on a good story if I hadn't read this.
Score
So with all of that in mind, I am giving "Outlaw MC" a score of 81/100 which is a four-star review on Amazon and Goodreads! This is a great story. If you have a friend or family member who loves gritty cop drama stories, and tales of action and adventure, this may be the story that will make their day or week better!
