THE IRON JACKAL - A Tale of the Ketty Jay - book review

You know you’re gonna have a real good time with a book when it opens with a chase, then has a robbery and then spends the rest of the story trying to ‘correct’ the aforementioned robbery. This is the third adventure featuring the rag tag crew from the Ketty Jay and this is by far the most enjoyable. So enjoyable that I literally didn’t want to put it down and really thought about pulling a ‘sickie’ just so I could keep reading it.
The second novel, The Black Lung Captain, was a more serious book I found and although terrific it’s wonderful having a much more ‘caper’ like adventure for the crew this time around. Having some darker more serious elements work well within this series but when it gets a bit too serious it never feels right to me. There are some fantastic action scenes littered throughout the novel, all bursting with excitement and plenty of bickering between the crew members, which is just what we’re after from a Ketty Jay novel afterall. Chris Wooding has been very careful throughout the novels in slowly revealing previous unknown elements of the characters pasts so over the serious we are gradually building more and more of a rounded picture of our favourites. Outside of all the action and adventure I must confess that this is one of my favourite elements in this series as it’s much more entertaining to slowly get to know a character over a period of stories then get to know everything about them in a paragraph, that would just be lazy and Wooding is in no way a lazy writer. In this novel it’s the character of Silo, the Murthian, who reveals more of his history than ever before, although small snippets were hinted at in the previous books, and he’s gone from being a strong silent type to someone much deeper.
Wooding is also really, really good at endings. Each of the Ketty Jay novels has ended perfectly and this is no exception. We get closure to this adventure but enough loose ends are there to be expanded on in further adventures with a few things possibly foreshadowing the next book yet at the same time being a perfect place to end the series if he so chose. Thankfully book four is due out in a couple of years, phew. Can’t imagine a world without the ‘Boyz (and girlz) from the Jay’ but bloody hell it’s gonna be a long f-ing wait.
But I do know one thing, it will be worth the wait.