Firefly: Coup de Grâce

The Firefly Series, Book 8

By: Una McCormack

Narrated by: Emily Lawrence, James Anderson Foster

Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

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.

I can picture the actors’ mannerisms.

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

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.

Okay, not great

Usually a fun ride; however, this is a mediocre storyline, made more difficult for the listener with the inconsistant southern accents.

Enjoyed

It took me a while to get used to two different people telling this story. But I get what they were trying to do. Typical Firefly story, good as always

Love this series

Amazing how different authors can write the same characters and every story is great. Keep them coming!

Least Favorite Firefly

I love the Firefly series for the way it gives us more time with well beloved characters, and I hope they write more. This one was my least favorite, though. I get what Una was trying to do, but Annie's character was annoying, and I don't care what she thinks of the crew. Her commentary was distracting and took away valuable time we could be directly enjoying the crew and their perspective. The crew was also split up for almost all the book in the same groups of two or three, limiting their overall interaction and giving us less of them together in diversity of interaction. And there was no Firefly as its own character. It was absent from the story. Overall, it felt like only a little taste of the crew and not a full Firefly adventure.

one narrator & move on

Multiple narrators only serve to confuse the story.

As much as I love Serenity and Firefly, we need to move on to events AFTER Serenity.