Firefly: Coup de Grâce

The Firefly Series, Book 8

By: Una McCormack

Narrated by: Emily Lawrence, James Anderson Foster

The Serenity lands on the remote moon of Abel for a lucrative job but becomes embroiled in a young woman’s quest for vengeance and a starving frontier town’s fight for survival. Join Mal and the gang in this enthralling original tie-in novel from the award-winning series.

The Serenity crew head to Yell City, one of the settlements on Abel, a moon in the Rim. Their job: track down the killers of a local lawyer shot dead in the streets by a local gang. Their client is Annie Roberts, the eighteen-year-old daughter of the murdered man.

Lucky for them, Annie Roberts is more than capable of handling herself. Unlucky for them, the job is lot more complicated than they at first think it is. Annie’s father is not just the victim of local gang violence but also the target of some powerful men.

Taking down a local gang is one thing, but cleaning up a whole city? That’s not a job for the Serenity crew. But when their ship is impounded and Mal and the crew find themselves trapped in Yell City, they realize they are already in deeper than they could have ever imagined.

©2023 20th Television (P)2023 Blackstone Publishing

If it’s not broke…

I’m a little ways into this and the new female narrator is hard to listen to. James is too perfect of a narrator to be interrupted by this new voice. Honestly I’m super disappointed with the direction they took for this. I’ll continue to listen for the crews perspective and for Fosters narration.

I can picture the actors’ mannerisms.

Good writing. Didn’t have to force the personalities. Each character came through true to form.

Enjoyable like all the rest

If you loved the TV shows, these books fill that hole, as long as they keep writing and using James Anderson Foster as the Narrator, I will keep buying

3.75 Not Their Best, Not Their Worst

They changed some stuff.
Not a huge fan of the wild change in perspective.
Split narration took a bit of getting used to.
Annie got annoying.
Will still listen to the series, but I much prefer some of the other titles.

2 Narrators was a mistake

Not only is it incredibly jarring to have a different person reading the same characters from one chapter to the next, but the difference in volume between the two is quite large. Some of that might be the guest narrator playing Annie, the presumed protagonist. She only has one voice, and it happens to be loud, angry, yet somehow S L O W and plodding Southern drawl. When she's not slow-yelling her way through exposition, she's ignoring any subtext of emotive direction and phoning in any supposed performance. It's intolerable.
Some of that might be the way the character was written, which is to say, poorly. She was apparently raised by the world's nicest Dad, but she's abrasive, rude, severely unlikable, and doesn't know the meaning of the word compromise. All in all, this particular story is fairly uniform and uninspired. There are much better books in this series, maybe skip this one.