Dead or Alive (Skulduggery Pleasant, #14)

by Derek Landy

Skulduggery, Valkyrie and Omen return in the 14th and penultimate novel in the internationally bestselling Skulduggery Pleasant series – and their most epic test yet…

In a matter of days, the world will change.

Billions of lives will be wiped away in a final, desperate search for the Child of the Faceless Ones — she who is destined to bring about the return of humankind's ancient overlords.

To prevent this, Skulduggery Pleasant and Valkyrie Cain have one last – terrible – option: the assassination of Damocles Creed. With protests stirring in the magical city of Roarhaven, with riots and revolutions on the horizon, Valkyrie must decide who she wants to be: the hero who risks everything for a noble ideal, or the killer who sacrifices her own soul for the fate of humanity.

The decision must be made, and time is running out.

• ISBN13: 9780008386290
• Publish Date: 1 April 2021
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 26 July 2022
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Inc
• Imprint: HarperCollins
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 608
• Language: English
• URL: http://harpercollins.co.uk

Reviews

[alindstadtcorbeax]

Star Rating: —> 4.5 Stars

THIS.

(Please excuse my language)

This was BLOODY F*CKING FANTASTIC!

Just... holy sh*t. This one was... and I have no other way to put this... absolute f*cking chaos... setting up for more absolute f*cking chaos as we approach the final book release. I am so SAD rn, because i've been waiting for this for what feels like foreverrrr & now its... over

[annieb123]

Originally posted on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

Dead or Alive is the 14th (and apparently penultimate) Skulduggery Pleasant adventure by Derek Landy. Due out 6th April 2021 from Harper Collins on their Harper360 imprint, it's a whopping 608 pages and will be available in paperback, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately.

For fans who are already readers of the series, this adventure is more of the same and is a welcome addition to this "doorstop brick" fantasy series. The books are all roughly 600(ish) pages and full of puns and slapstick battles and sleazy slightly ridiculous bad guys and of course Skullduggery himself along with sarcastic and angsty teen sidekick Valkyrie.

For readers who are not familiar with the series, the books (and this one in particular) don't really work well as standalone stories. There's a *lot* of continuity involved with the characters and their development and coming into book 14 blind will likely prove to be a frustrating slog. I would recommend picking up at least the first book and seeing if it's a good fit before investing in the mammoth task of consecutively binge reading the whole series.

Although this is listed as a YA selection, it felt more genre spanning and will likely pick up a fair number of SF/fantasy fans. I am not much of a squeeing fangirl and find that I have a surprisingly low threshold for sarcastic snappy dialogue (such as Harry Dresden, Hearne's Iron Druid, others in the same subgenre). I will say that the plotting and story arc are well put together and despite the page count, didn't strike me as suffering from book bloat. There's always something happening and there wasn't much which was superfluous to the story. The language is relatively clean (a few instances of damn and bloody, nothing worse).

All in all for me personally three and a half stars, rounded up for the quality of the writing. For current fans of the series, the rating will be highers. Fans of the first books will love this one too.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.