This is the final book in the series. I have to admit I didn’t know where it was going to go when I finished the last book. I didn’t enjoy this book as much as the last two. The final favour is called in, and the story wraps up nicely, but we don’t get to meet the Franco, etc until late on in this book, and I think I was hoping for another magical train tale.

All in all, I didn’t enjoy this as much as the other two, but it does conclude well.

This was really an enjoyable and engaging reading, filled with a great plot line and great characters.
Thank you NetGaleey for my ARC!

This was an enjoyable read.
It's entertaining and engaging. The characters are likeable and lively.

Huge thank you to NetGalley and HQ Digital Publishing for approving me for this galley in exchange for my honest opinion.

A great series I enjoyed this, fast paced and fun. Seemed to be not quite as good as the others, but overall enjoyable series

Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for a free copy for an honest opinion

Yes yes yes, this book was great! Read it! Thank you netgalley for the free arc in exchange for an honest review!

So much better than the last two!

Jack is amazing, the story so good and relationships so much fun. The narrative was good and carried all the the way through.

Such a great ending!

Den of Smoke is an average read. It's entertaining and engaging. The characters are likeable and lively. Overall, it's just not my favorite. Thanks to NetGalley for an arc in exchange for an honest review.

Interestingly, I'm not sure I would call this a sequel to the previous books, given that the majority of the action is centred on anyone but Franco and Misu. I'd probably call, at least the first 50-70% of this book a companion novel. It has the same setting as the first two books and follows on from the action of Den of Stars but it is about Jackdaw and his crew. I appreciated this hugely as I felt I had had just about enough of the train setting and it was interesting to read something set somewhere a little more static.

It's always a dangerous line to tread, writing criminal gangs because you have to recognise their morality as, at best, grey, but also endear the reader to them enough that they forgive them their wrongdoings. I think this was achieved in the character of Jackdaw. My issue with the second book in this series was that the motivation of characters wasn't quite as clear as I would have liked it to be. In Den of Smoke I thought that, at least for the character of Jackdaw, this was rectified. He was a fun character to read and he neither felt too evil or too good.

Where this book lost me a little is that it wasn't clear, at the start certainly, who the main character was going to be. There is a lot of setting built around Cole, who is also an interesting character, but then later on Jackdaw becomes far more centred. I might have preferred had this been clearly split into a dual POV, but once you get the hang of the fact that you need to worry about both characters it's easier to follow the plot.

As with the second book, you have to let this book build to the action, though there is a lot happening from the start. It takes until around 60% in to get to the meat of the story and from there on I was hooked, I appreciated the need to set up this entirely new gang and to work out where the characters were coming from. But that's why I would be more inclined to call this a companion novel than the third book in a trilogy. Judged from that perspective I think this is a hugely enjoyable story to read.

My rating: 4/5 stars

I received a digital advanced review copy of this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.