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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Heard" data-source="post: 2424891" data-attributes="member: 7280">I don't know, I've read most of his books except for the Sharpe series and while I was initially impressed I've gotten over that and started feeling that he forces horrific acts when they don't make much sense or at least at not particularly favorable points in the story. In short they get to where it's all about slogging through the mud and having your female companions raped by bandits, and while that might be sort of refreshingly historically accurate I'm just not sure if it's good fiction over and over again. I'd almost like to see him write a book on normal people, away from warfare in the near present day, just to see if he could perform it without falling into paragraphs-long descriptions of someone's disease-ridden body, a villain only marginally more personable than the hero of the story, a string of women enduring a string of rape and abuse, and someone retaliating to an injustice with an atrocious act of violence. Moral ambiguity might be his strong point, but after a while it's just not making as much of an impact because there's no strong comparison and the language is just repeating itself. I get the feeling that a lot of his characters simply age without developing much or at all.</blockquote>