I’ll just come right out and say it: holy CRAP was I disappointed in this one. In the decade since it hit the streets, Carter has gotten nearly universally good reviews. Everyone loves it. It’s been on my “I should read that” list for a long, long time, so when geek-celeb Wil Wheaton wrote about loving it on his blog a month ago, I finally got around to ordering it from Amazon.

Carter Beats the Devil is one of those “fictional story told with real-life character” books, which sometimes works but usually ends up too clever by half. This one starts well enough, but Gold really kinda runs out of steam about halfway through. It went from a page-turner to a slog, and then stayed there; I found it a chore to finish. Even the “big reveals” towards the end didn’t really pay off for me, anyway.

Anyway, onward.